Global Receptions

In the early 13^th century, the Icelandic poet and politician Snorri Sturluson composed his Edda (now known as the Prose or Snorra Edda) while part of the court of the Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson. The Edda promises to allow its student to become a master of an archaic style of Scandinavian poetry and begins with a genealogical account of Scandinavian rulers. In this account, Snorri focuses his attention on “the middle of the world” (miðri veröldinni), or Troy (Trjóa, now Tyrkland).

In this paper, I offer a case study in classical epic reception that focuses on an episode in José Basílio da Gama’s 18^th century Brazilian neoclassical vernacular epic O Uraguai that I argue is intertextually informed by the description of Aeneas' dream of Hector in the second book of Vergil’s Aeneid. José Basílio da Gama (1740-1795) was a Brazilian poet and statesman educated in the classical tradition at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and who later became a member of the Italian learned society called the Arcadia Ultramarina.

“Learned Poetry,” Modernist Juxtaposition, and the Classics: Three Case Studies

Between 1960-76, the Houston-based Menil Foundation undertook the monumental publication of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a 10-volume series tracing depictions of people from Africa between 3,000 B.C.E. and the present. The series took what was then the bold position that race was a sociological construct; in the general introduction, its editor Ladislas Bugner noted that “any preliminary definition of the ‘Negro’” (1976.1.3) had to be arrived at contextually, rather than through fixed anthropological or biological criteria.

The study of the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in Japan (and East Asia more generally) is a growing field exploring both the creative use of this material in modern cultural artefacts and the history of Greek and Roman studies as a discipline (for both, see most recently Renger and Fan 2018). This paper explores how the Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) incorporates references to ancient the Greek and Roman world into his first novel I am a Cat (Wagahai wa Neko Dearu).