Reception

Scholars of French and English literature have recognized that the sibyl served as a symbol during the Romantic period for women authors who sought to break into the male dominated literary tradition (Hoog 1991, Lewis 2003). This paper employs depictions of the sibyl in Latin poetry as a framework for considering the sibyl’s reception in the fiction of four prominent women authors.

In Fam. 24, 11 Petrarch writes about the legacy of Virgil’s works: Aeneas’s glory lives on, the Mantuan fields continue to glimmer thanks to the fourfold cleft of the Georgics, and an older Tityrus, keeps playing his slender pipe (55: Tityrus ut tenuem senior iam perflat avenam). I approach this reference to Tityrus’s age as an entry point into examining a particular aspect of Petrarch’s complex self-fashioning as post-Virgilian poet (Hinds 2004). The shepherd’s old age in Fam.

Since Charles Martindale’s Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge, 1993), the idea that ‘meaning … is always already realized at the point of reception’ has become a mantra of classical reception studies. (Martindale 1993: 3; Hardie 2007; Martindale 2013: 1).

Although researchers have examined the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in a range of popular media, including movies, videogames, comics, science fiction, fantasy, and children's literature, romance novels have not garnered their attention.

Marisela Treviño Orta’s Woman on Fire (updated version, 2016) presents a dramatic interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone that explores the relationship between Chicanx and Mexican experiences at the geographical/political border between the United States and Mexico. In this paper, I explore how Treviño Orta’s play finds adaptive value in the Antigone through its narrative ability to vivify the corporeal conflicts of Chicanx (and Latinx) experience.

After Caesar defeated Vercingetorix at Alesia in 52 BCE, he paraded the conquered Gaul in his triumph in Rome, and produced a denarius, Rome’s standard coin, showing Vercingetorix in profile, striking with his unkempt hair, long moustache, and gaunt features. This image gave Romans a close-up view of Rome’s enemy, and greatly contributed to Caesar’s prestige and renown during the power struggle that engulfed Italy in the 40s BCE.

Literary homosexuality in Greece has long been coded through an elaborate web of references to the classical past. The apparent cultural acceptance of homosexual behaviour in antiquity provided a framework for many twentieth-century Greek writers, such as Cavafy, Kazantzákis, and Rítsos, to discuss the existence of non-heterosexual male identities within their own works, along with proof that such desire was quintessentially ‘Greek’ [Ekdawi 1996].

Mary Astell (1666-1731) was ahead of her time. Not only for her feminist thought, but also for ushering Cato the Younger into the 18^th century, when he became a central literary figure, appearing in numerous tragedies, philosophic works, and histories. At the dawn of the century, Astell wrote, “[Cato could not] bear the sight of the triumphant Conqueror . . .

On 27th July 1919, in the midst of a heatwave, Eugene Williams, an African American teenager from the South Side of Chicago, was playing on a raft when he drifted across an imaginary line in Lake Michigan demarcating the ‘white’ and ‘black’ areas of the beach. A white man threw a rock, Williams went under and drowned. His murder sparked the violent Chicago Race Riots that defined the ‘Red Summer’.