Classics in the Modern World A Democratic Turn?

Classics in the Modern World brings together a collection of distinguished international contributors to discuss the features and implications of a 'democratic turn' in modern perceptions of ancient Greece and Rome. It examines how Greek and Roman material has been involved with issues of democracy, both in political culture and in the greater diffusion of classics in recent times outside the elite classes. By looking at individual case studies from theatre, film, fiction, TV, radio, museums, and popular media, and through area studies that consider trends over time in particular societies, the volume explores the relationship between Greek and Roman ways of thinking and modern definitions of democratic practices and approaches, enabling a wider re-evaluation of the role of ancient Greece and Rome in the modern world.

1 - Questioning the democratic, and democratic questioning
2 - Against the Democratic Turn: Counter-texts; Counter-contexts; Counter- arguments
3 - Conflicts of democracy and citizenship: Between the Greek and the Roman Political Legacies
4 - The Reception of the Roman-Dutch Law of Treason in South Africa
5 - Labour and the Classics: Plato and Crossman in Dialogue
6 - Appropriations of Cicero and Cato in the Making of American Civic Identity
7 - The Weapon of Oratory
8 - Civilization versus Savagery at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
9 - Expansion of Tragedy as Critique
10 - Investigating American women's engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity, and expanding the circle of 'classicists'
11 - The Democratic Turn in (and through) pedagogy: a case study of the Cambridge Latin Course
12 - Classics in African Education : the rhetoric of colonial commissions
13 - Back to the demos. An 'anti-classical' approach to Classics
14 - Can 'Democratic' Stagings of Modern Greek Drama be Authentic?
15 - The triumph of demotike: the triumph of Medea
16 - Aristophanes in Performance as an all-inclusive event': audience participation and celebration in the modern staging of Aristophanic comedy
17 - Constructing Bridges for Peace and Tolerance: Ancient Greek Drama on the Israeli Stage
18 - The Silence of Eurydice: case study for a 'topology of democracy'
19 - Ovidian Metamorphoses in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt
20 - Catullus and Lesbia translated in women's historical novels
21 - Female Voices: the democratic turn in Ali Smith's classical reception
22 - Heroes or Villains: The Gracchi, Reform and the Nineteenth-Century Press
23 - Democracy and popular media: classical receptions in 19th and 20th century political cartoons: statesmen, mythological figures and celebrated artworks
24 - Practising classical reception studies 'in the round': mass media engagements with antiquity and the 'democratic turn' towards the audience
25 - In search of ancient myths: documentaries and the quest for the Homeric World
26 - Truth, Justice, and the Spartan Way : Affectations of Democracy in Frank Miller's 300
27 - A 'Democratic Turn' at the Ashmolean Museum
28 - All Mod Cons: Power, Openness and Text in a Digital Turn
29 - Afterword

Lorna Hardwick is Emeritus Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University. She has published books and articles on Greek drama and on Greek and Latin poetry and historiography and its reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is editor of the Classical Receptions Journal and co-series editor of the Classical Presences series (OUP). Stephen Harrison is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Oxford. He is author of books on Vergil, Horace, and Apuleius and of a range of pieces on classical reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.