Reception and its Contexts

I attempt to reconstruct how Ralph Ellison’s readings at Tuskegee and his work at the Federal Writers Project shaped the development of his understanding of the nature of Homeric orality, its relation to jazz and the blues, and ultimately his own role as author.

This paper aims to show how Martha Graham’s Night Journey captivates us by drawing on its primary model, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and on Ancient Greek sculpture and vase painting.

Helen Chesnutt's The Road To Latin in the 21st Century Classroom

The figure of Dido, the mythical queen of Carthage whose story is most famously told in Virgil’s Aeneid, was appropriated in a variety of ways in popular publications in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This paper considers the reception of the legend surrounding Carthage’s destruction by Rome and locates a new origin in the historiography and folklore of the medieval Maghreb. When the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus captured Rome’s longtime rival of Carthage in 146 BCE, he burned the city to the ground and declared it cursed ground, forbidden to any future settlement.

Lucy Hutchinson (1618-1681) was a Latinist and poet who produced the first full translation of Lucretius into English verse—a philosophically controversial choice for a committed Puritan woman, and one that she herself questions in the preface to her manuscript. Hutchinson’s work outside the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, her biography of her husband, has only in the past few decades come into scholarly focus (e.g. the work of David Norbrook and Hugh de Quehen).