Exhibit Sources: Books
Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts by
To what extent did mythological figures such as Circe and Medea influence the representation of the powerful 'oriental' enchantress in modern Western art? What role did the ancient gods and heroes play in the construction of the imaginary worlds of the modern fantasy genre? What is the role of undead creatures like zombies and vampires in mythological films? Looking across the millennia, from the distrust of ancient magic and oriental cults, which threatened the new-born Christian religion, to the revival and adaptation of ancient myths and religion in the arts centuries later, this book offers an original analysis of the reception of ancient magic and the supernatural, across a wide variety of different media - from comics to film, from painting to opera. Working in a variety of fields across the globe, the authors of these essays deconstruct certain scholarly traditions by proposing original interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations, showing to what extent the visual and performing arts of different periods interlink and shape cultural and social identities.
Publication Date: 2015 -- online
Ancient Worlds in Film and Television by
Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon -- Ben-Hur and Gladiator: Manifest Destiny and the Contradictions of American Empire / Jon Solomon -- Muscles and Morals: Spartacus, Ancient Hero of Modern Times / Thomas Späth and Margrit Tröhler -- With Your Shield or On It: The Gender of Heroism in Zack Snyder’s 300 and Rudoph Maté’s The 300 Spartans / Thorsten Beigel -- “This is Sparta!”: Discourse, Gender, and the Orient in Zack Snyder’s 300 / Jeroen Lauwers , Marieke Dhont and Xanne Huybrecht -- “Everybook-body Loves a Muscle Boi”: Homos, Heroes, and Foes in Post-9/11 Spoofs of the 300 Spartans / Ralph J. Poole -- The Womanizing of Mark Antony: Virile Ruthlessness and Redemptive Cross-Dressing in Rome, Season Two / Margaret M. Toscano -- Cleopatra’s Venus / Elisabeth Bronfen -- Over His Dead Body: Male Friendship in Homer’s Iliad and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004) / Andreas Krass -- Models of Masculinities in Troy: Achilles, Hector and Their Female Partners / Celina Proch and Michael Kleu -- “Include me out” – Odysseus on the Margins of European Genre Cinema: Le Mépris, Ulisse, L’Odissea / Christian Pischel -- Between Mythical and Rational Worlds: Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini / Lada Stevanović -- “Universal’s Religious Bigotry Against Hinduism”: Gender Norms and Hindu Authority in the Global Media Debate on Representing the Hindu God Krishna in Xena: Warrior Princess / Xenia Zeiler -- Ancient Women’s Cults and Rituals in Grand Narratives on Screen: From Walt Disney’s Snow White to Olga Malea’s Doughnuts with Honey / Svetlana Slapšak -- Pandora-Eve-Ava: Albert Lewin’s Making of a “Secret Goddess” / Almut-Barbara Renger -- Phryne Paves the Way for the Wirtschaftswunder: Visions of Guilt and “Purity” Fed by Ancient Greece, Christian Narrative, and Contemporary History / Barbara Schrödl -- The New Israeli Film Beruriah: Between Rashi and Talmud, between Antiquity and Modernity, between Feminism and Religion / Tal Ilan
Publication Date: 2012 -- online
Classical Antiquity in Video Games : Playing with the Ancient World by
From gaming consoles to smartphones, video games are everywhere today, including those set in historical times and particularly in the ancient world. This volume explores the varied depictions of the ancient world in video games and demonstrates the potential challenges of games for scholars as well as the applications of game engines for educational and academic purposes. With successful series such as "Assassin's Creed" or "Civilization" selling millions of copies, video games rival even television and cinema in their role in shaping younger audiences' perceptions of the past. Yet classical scholarship, though embracing other popular media as areas of research, has so far largely ignored video games as a vehicle of classical reception. This collection of essays fills this gap with a dedicated study of receptions, remediations and representations of Classical Antiquity across all electronic gaming platforms and genres. It presents cutting-edge research in classics and classical receptions, game studies and archaeogaming, adopting different perspectives and combining papers from scholars, gamers, game developers and historical consultants. In doing so, it delivers the first state-of-the-art account of both the wide array of 'ancient' video games, as well as the challenges and rewards of this new and exciting field.
Publication Date: 2020 -- online
Classical New York: : Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham by Publication Date: 2018 -- online
The Classical Tradition : art, literature, thought by
The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought presents an authoritative, coherent and wide-ranging guide to the afterlife of Greco-Roman antiquity in later Western cultures and a ground-breaking reinterpretation of large aspects of Western culture as a whole from a classical perspective. Features a unique combination of chronological range, cultural scope, coherent argument, and unified analysis Written in a lively, engaging, and elegant manner Presents an innovative overview of the afterlife of antiquity Crosses disciplinary boundaries to make new sense of a rich variety of material, rarely brought together Fully illustrated with a mix of color and black & white images
Publication Date: 2013 -- online
Classicisms in the Black Atlantic by
The historical and cultural space of the Black Atlantic - a diasporic world of forced and voluntary migrations - has long provided fertile ground for the construction and reconstruction of new forms of classicism. From the aftermath of slavery up to the present day, black authors,intellectuals, and artists in the Atlantic world have shaped and reshaped the cultural legacies of classical antiquity in a rich variety of ways in order to represent their identities and experiences and reflect on modern conceptions of race, nation, and identity.The studies presented in this volume range across the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone worlds, including literary studies of authors such as Derek Walcott, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Junot Diaz, biographical and historical studies, and explorations of race and classicism in the visualarts. They offer reflections on the place of classicism in contemporary conflicts and debates over race and racism, and on the intersections between classicism, race, gender, and social status, demonstrating how the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome have been used to buttress racial hierarchies,but also to challenge racism and Eurocentric reconstructions of antiquity.
Publication Date: 2020 -- online
The Classics and Colonial India by
This extraordinary book provides a detailed account of the relationship between classical antiquity and the British colonial presence in India. It examines some of the great figures of the colonial period such as Gandhi, Nehru, Macaulay, Jowett, and William Jones, and covers a range ofdifferent disciplines as it sweeps from the eighteenth century to the end of the British Raj in the twentieth.Using a variety of materials, including archival documents and familiar texts, Vasunia shows how classical culture pervaded the thoughts and minds of the British colonizers. His book highlights the many Indian receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity and analyses how Indians turned to ancient Greece andRome during the colonial period for a variety of purposes, including anti-colonialism, nationalism, and collaboration.Offering a unique cross-cultural study, this volume will be of interest to literary scholars and historians of the classical world, the British Empire, and South Asia.
Publication Date: 2013 -- online
Classics for All : Reworking Antiquity in Mass Culture by
Classical culture belongs to us all: whether as academic subject or as entertainment, it constantly stimulates new ideas. In recent years, following Gladiator's successful revival of the 'toga epic', studies of the ancient world in cinema have drawn increasing attention from authors and readers. This collection builds on current interest in this topic, taking its readers past the usual boundaries of classical reception studies into less familiar-and even uncharted-areas of ancient Greece and Rome in mass popular culture. Contributors discuss the uses of antiquity in television programmes, computer games, journalism, Hollywood blockbusters, B-movies, pornography, Web 2.0, radio drama, and children's literature. Its diverse contents celebrate the continuing influence of Classics on modern life: from controversies within academia to ephemeral pop culture, from the traditional to the cutting-edge. The reader will find both new voices and those of more established commentators, including broadcaster and historian Bettany Hughes, Latinist Paula James, and Gideon Nisbet, author of Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture. Together they demonstrate that rich rewards await anyone with an interest in our classical heritage, when they embrace the diversity and complexity of mass popular culture as a whole.
Publication Date: 2009 -- online
Classics in Extremis: the edges of classical reception by
Classics in Extremis reimagines classical reception. Its contributors explore some of the most remarkable, hard-fought and unsettling claims ever made on the ancient world: from the coal-mines of England to the paradoxes of Borges, from Victorian sexuality to the trenches of the First World War, from American public-school classrooms to contemporary right-wing politics. How does the reception of the ancient world change under impossible strain? Its protagonists are 'marginal' figures who resisted that definition in the strongest terms. Contributors argue for a decentered model of classical reception: where the 'marginal' shapes the 'central' as much as vice versa - and where the most unlikely appropriations of antiquity often have the greatest impact. What kind of distortions does the model of 'centre' and 'margins' produce? How can 'marginal' receptions be recovered most effectively? Bringing together some of the leading scholars in the field, Classics in Extremis moves beyond individual case studies to develop fresh methodologies and perspectives on the study of classical reception.
Publication Date: 2018 -- online
Deep Classics by
Fragmented, buried, and largely lost, the classical past presents formidable obstacles to anyone who would seek to know it. 'Deep Classics' is the study of these obstacles and, in particular, of the way in which the contemplation of the classical past resembles - and has even provided a model for - other kinds of human endeavor. This volume offers a new way to understand the modalities and aims of Classics itself, through the ages. Its individual chapters draw fruitful connections between the reception of the classical and current concerns in philosophy of mind, cognitive theory, epistemology, media studies, sense studies, aesthetics, queer theory and eco-criticism.What does the study of the ancient past teach us about our encounters with our own more recent but still elusive memories? What do our always partial reconstructions of ancient sites tell us about the limits of our ability to know our own world, or to imagine our future? What does the reader of the lacunose and corrupted literatures of antiquity learn thereby about literature and language themselves? What does a shattered statue reveal about art, matter, sensation, experience, life? Does the way in which these vestiges of the past are encountered - sitting in a library, standing in a gallery, moving through a ruin - condition our responses to them and alter their significance? And finally, how has the contemplation of antiquity helped to shape seemingly unrelated disciplines, including not only other humanistic and scientific epistemologies but also non-scholarly modes and practices? In asking these and similar questions, Deep Classics makes a pointed intervention in the study of the classical tradition, now more widely known as 'reception studies'.
Publication Date: 2016- Deep Classics : rethinking classical reception by
1.Homer's Deep / Shane Butler -- 2.The Sigh of Philhellenism / Joshua Billings -- 3.Feeling on the Surface: Touch and Emotion in Fuseli and Homer / Alex Purves -- 4.Perceiving (in) Depth: Landscape, Sculpture, Ruin / Helen Slaney -- 5.Etymological `Alterity': Depths and Heights / Joshua T. Katz -- 6.Shut Your Eyes and See: Digesting the Past with Nietzsche and Joyce / Adam Lecznar -- 7.The Loss of Telos: Pasolini, Fugard, and the Oresteia / Sarah Nooter -- 8.Kings of the Stone Age, or How to Read an Ancient Inscription / Stephanie Ann Frampton -- 9.Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past / Sebastian Matzner -- 10.Medea's Erotic Jealousy / Giulia Sissa -- 11.Ghostwritten Classics / Edmund Richardson -- 12.Relic | channel | ghost: Centaurs in Algernon Blackwood's The Centaur / Mark Payne -- 13.Circulation of Spectres: Ghosts and Spells / Davide Susanetti -- 14.Cosmopoiesis in the Field of `The Classical' / Brooke Holmes -- 15.Borges and the Disclosure of Antiquity / Laura Jansen.
Publication Date: 2016 -- online
Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture by
From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and theprojection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided arepository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of anational commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it has suggestedthat the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin."
Publication Date: 2017 -- online
Housing the New Romans : architectural reception and classical style in the modern world by
In the last twenty years, reception studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the ways in which Classics has shaped modern Western culture, but very little attention has been directed toward the reception of classical architecture. Housing the New Romans: Architectual Receptionand Classical Style in the Modern World addresses this gap by investigating ways in which appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome through the requisition and redeployment of classicizing tropes to create neo-Antique sites of "dwelling" in the 19th and early20th centuries.The volume, across nine essays, will cover both European and American iterations of place making, including Sir John Soanes' house in London, the Hotel de Beauharnais in Paris, and the Getty Villa in California. By focusing on structures and places that are oriented towards private life - houses,hotels, clubs, tombs, and gardens - the volume directs the critical gaze towards diverse and complex sites of curatorial self-fashioning. The goal of the volume is to provide a multiplicity of interpretative frameworks (e.g. object-agency enchantment, hyperreality, memory-infrastructure) that may beapplied to the study of architectural reception. This critical approach makes Housing the New Romans the first work of its kind in the emerging field of architectural and landscape reception studies and in the hitherto textually dominated field of classical reception.
Publication Date: 2017 -- online
Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art by
This book offers the first concentrated examination of the representation of the black female subject in Western art through the lenses of race/color and sex/gender. Charmaine A. Nelson poses critical questions about the contexts of production, the problems of representation, the pathways of circulation and the consequences of consumption. She analyzes not only how, where, why and by whom black female subjects have been represented, but also what the social and cultural impacts of the colonial legacy of racialized western representation have been. Nelson also explores and problematizes the issue of the historically privileged white artistic access to black female bodies and the limits of representation for these subjects. This book not only reshapes our understanding of the black female representation in Western Art, but also furthers our knowledge about race and how and why it is (re)defined and (re)mobilized at specific times and places throughout history.
Publication Date: 2010 -- online
Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition by
This collection of fourteen essays explores how the dominant media of our time - film and television - have engaged with the golden age as formulated in the Western classical tradition. Drawing on ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture, from Hesiod to Suetonius, these essays assess the far-reaching influence of the golden age concept on screen texts ranging from prestige projects like Gladiator and HBO's Rome, to cult classics Xanadu and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, made by auteurs including Jules Dassin and the Coen Brothers. The book also looks at fantasy (Game of Thrones), science fiction (Serenity), horror (The Walking Dead), war/combat (the 300 franchise; Centurion), and the American Western. Situates recurring outbreaks of nostalgia for earlier times within a transhistorical phenomenon Illuminates how this cultural phenomenon is rooted in the discourses that emerge from the classical tradition--so much so, that both high-minded and base political movements invoke classical antiquity in their ideological campaigns Explores how such invocations of the mythical past are frequently accomplished not only through political rhetoric, but also through popular media
Publication Date: 2020 -- online
Son of Classics and Comics by
Wonder Woman, Amazon Princess; Asterix, indefatigable Gaul; Ozymandias, like Alexander looking for new worlds to conquer. Comics use classical sources, narrative patterns, and references to enrich their imaginative worlds and deepen the stories they present. Son of Classics and Comics exploresthat rich interaction. This volume presents thirteen original studies of representations of the ancient world in the medium of comics. Building on the foundation established by their groundbreaking Classics and Comics (OUP, 2011), Kovacs and Marshall have gathered a wide range of studies with a new,global perspective. Chapters are helpfully grouped to facilitate classroom use, with sections on receptions of Homer, on manga, on Asterix, and on the sense of a 'classic" in the modern world.All Greek and Latin are translated. Lavishly illustrated, the volume widens the range of available studies on the reception of the Greek and Roman worlds in comics significantly, and deepens our understanding of comics as a literary medium. Son of Classics and Comics will appeal to students andscholars of classical reception as well as comics fans.
Publication Date: 2015 -- onlinee
Exhibit Sources: Images
- ARTstor This link opens in a new window ARTstor is a database of images from museums, artists, libraries, colleges and universities, scholars, private collections, and photo archives available for teaching, education, and scholarship, with all images cleared for educational use.
- Associated Press Images Collection This link opens in a new window Associated Press Images Collection is a searchable collection of recent and historical photos from the Associated Press, plus AP graphics, articles, and brief sound clips.
Exhibit Sources: Newspapers & Magazines
- ProQuest Recent Newspapers This link opens in a new window Searchable digital archive of recent newspapers that offers full-page images of Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Date coverage: 2008 to 2 months ago.
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window Full-page images and article images (PDF) with searchable full text from the following newspapers: Boston Globe; New York Times; Washington Post; Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Defender. See listing for each individual newspaper for date coverage and to search that publication separately.
- Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window Full text articles from newspapers and periodicals published by ethnic, minority and native presses in the U.S. Includes both historic publications, starting in 1959, as well as current ones.
- Newspapers & News Media - Boston University Libraries Research GuideNewspaper articles are both historical and current.
Search them for the most up-to-date sources.
BULS searches some newspapers, e.g., NYT
Databases
- Berg Fashion Library This link opens in a new window The Berg Fashion Library includes the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, an e-book collection, and an image database. This database covers all regions of the world with content from pre-history to the present.
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