BiblioVault - Books about Classics

Carnival

Entertainments and Posthumous Tales

Isak Dinesen

University of Chicago Press, 1979

Carnival is an animated collection of works from every stage of Isak Dinesen's career. Many were written during her most creative years but set aside; others she wrote "just for entertainment." The collection includes "Second Meeting," her last work, and the title story, the first written under her now-famous pen name. None of these stories has previously appeared in book form in English. Three of them were translated especially for this collection by P. M. Mitchell and W. D. Paden.

"The editors have included only material that will stand easily with her more familiar work and satisfy her large following. . . . The rough drafts and variant treatments have been set aside for scholars."—Joseph McLellan, Washington Post

"The wit, the imagination, the elevated philosophical dialogue mark most of the stories in this volume as vintage Dinesen . . . of special interest to Dinesen fans."—Robert Langbaum, New York Times Book Review

[more]

The Chinese Love Pavilion

A Novel

Paul Scott

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Paul Scott is most famous for his much-beloved tetralogy The Raj Quartet, an epic that chronicles the end of the British rule in India with a cast of vividly and memorably drawn characters. Inspired by Scott’s own time spent in India and Malaya during World War II, this two powerful novel provides valuable insight into how foreign lands changed the British who worked and fought in them, hated and loved them.

The Chinese Love Pavilion follows a young British clerk, Tom Brent, who must track down a former friend—now suspected of murder—in Malaya. Tom faces great danger, both from the mysterious Malayan jungles and the political tensions between British officers, but the novel is perhaps most memorable for the strange, beautiful romance between Tom and a protean Eurasian beauty whom he meets in the eponymous Chinese Love Pavilion.

[more]

Classics from Papyrus to the Internet

An Introduction to Transmission and Reception

By Jeffrey M. Hunt, R. Alden Smith, and Fabio Stok

University of Texas Press, 2017

Winner, PROSE Award, Classics, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2018

Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of the West, a moment from which many current conventions and attitudes toward books can be traced. But how did texts originally written on papyrus in perhaps the eighth century BC survive across nearly three millennia, so that today people can read them electronically on a smartphone?

Classics from Papyrus to the Internet provides a fresh, authoritative overview of the transmission and reception of classical texts from antiquity to the present. The authors begin with a discussion of ancient literacy, book production, papyrology, epigraphy, and scholarship, and then examine how classical texts were transmitted from the medieval period through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the modern era. They also address the question of reception, looking at how succeeding generations responded to classical texts, preserving some but not others. This sheds light on the origins of numerous scholarly disciplines that continue to shape our understanding of the past, as well as the determined effort required to keep the literary tradition alive. As a resource for students and scholars in fields such as classics, medieval studies, comparative literature, paleography, papyrology, and Egyptology, Classics from Papyrus to the Internet presents and discusses the major reference works and online professional tools for studying literary transmission.

[more]

Classics in Film and Fiction

Edited by Deborah Cartmell, Heidi Kaye, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan

Pluto Press, 2000

This book negotiates the notion of a 'classic' in film and fiction, exploring the growing interface and the blurring of boundaries between literature and film. Taking the problematic term 'classic' as its focus, the contributors consider both canonical literary and film texts, questioning whether classic status in one domain transfers it to another.

Classics in Film and Fiction looks at a wide range of texts and their adaptations. Authors discussed are Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, Truman Capote and Lewis Carroll. Book to film adaptations analysed include Jane Eyre, The Crucible, The Tempest and Alice in Wonderland. The collection also evaluates the term 'classic' in a wider context, including a comparison of Joyce's Ulysses with Hitchcock's Rear Window. Throughout, the contributors challenge the dichotomy between high culture and pop culture.

[more]

Classics in Translation, Volume I

Greek Literature

Edited by Paul L. MacKendrick and Herbert M. Howe

University of Wisconsin Press, 1959

Here, translated into modern English, are the works of literature, history, science, oratory, and philosophy that constitute the mainstream of classical Greek thought and continue to influence world civilizations. This volume includes:
· Complete translations of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Medea, Aristophanes’ Frogs, and The Constitution of Athens by the “Old Oligarch.”
· Abridged translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and Plutarch’s Life of Tiberius Gracchus.
· Selections from Hesiod and Lucian; from twenty-eight lyric poets including Sappho, Pindar, and Meleagar; from the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides; and from eight Attic orators, including Isocrates and Demosthenes.
· Selections from the scientific writings of Hippocrates, Archimedes, and Galen.
· Selections from the pre-Socratic philosophers and from Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Epictetus.

[more]

Classics in Translation, Volume II

Latin Literature

Edited by Paul L. MacKendrick and Herbert M. Howe

University of Wisconsin Press, 1959

Here, translated into modern English, are the works of literature, history, science, oratory, and philosophy that constitute the mainstream of Roman thought and continue to influence world civilizations. This volume includes:
· Complete translations of Plautus’ The Haunted House, Terence’s Woman from Andros, Seneca’s Medea, and the Deeds of the Deified Augustus.
· Selections from Vergil’s Georgics and Aeneid, the poems of Catullus, Horace’s Odes, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti, the Satyricon of Petronius, and the Sixth Satire of Juvenal.
· Selections from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, Cicero’s speeches and philosophical works, and Quintilian’s The Training of the Orator.
· Selections from histories by Sallust, Livy’s History of Rome, Tacitus’ Annals and Germania, and letters of Pliny the Younger.

[more]

Classics of Social Choice

Iain McLean and Arnold Urken, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Pioneering contributions to social choice and voting from Pliny to Lewis Carroll

[more]

Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond

Eric Adler

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Beginning with a short intellectual history of the academic culture wars, Eric Adler’s book examines popular polemics including those by Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza, and considers the oddly marginal role of classical studies in these conflicts. In presenting a brief history of classics in American education, the volume sheds light on the position of the humanities in general.

Adler dissects three significant controversies from the era: the so-called AJP affair, which supposedly pitted a conservative journal editor against his feminist detractors; the brouhaha surrounding Martin Bernal’s contentious Black Athena project; and the dustup associated with Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath’s fire-breathing jeremiad, Who Killed Homer? He concludes by considering these controversies as a means to end the crisis for classical studies in American education. How can the study of antiquity—and the humanities—thrive in the contemporary academy? This book provides workable solutions to end the crisis for classics and for the humanities as well.

This major work also includes findings from a Web survey of American classical scholars, offering the first broadly representative impression of what they think about their discipline and its prospects for the future. Adler also conducted numerous in-depth interviews with participants in the controversies discussed, allowing readers to gain the most reliable information possible about these controversies.

Those concerned about the liberal arts and the best way to educate young Americans should read this book. Accessible and jargon-free, this narrative of scholarly scandals and their context makes for both enjoyable and thought-provoking reading.

[more]

Collected Stories

Bruno Schulz, Translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine Foreword by Rivka Galchen

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Winner of the 2019 Found in Translation Award

Collected Stories is an authoritative new translation of the complete fiction of Bruno Schulz, whose work has influenced writers as various as Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Danilo Kiš, and Roberto Bolaño.

Schulz’s prose is renowned for its originality. Set largely in a fictional counterpart of his hometown of Drohobych, his stories merge the real and the surreal. The most ordinary objects—the wind, an article of clothing, a plate of fish—can suddenly appear unfathomably mysterious and capable of illuminating profound truths. As Father, one of his most intriguing characters, declaims: “Matter has been granted infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms.”

This comprehensive volume brings together all of Schulz's published stories—Cinnamon Shops, his most famous collection (sometimes titled The Street of Crocodiles in English), The Sanatorium under the Hourglass, and an additional four stories that he did not include in either of his collections. Madeline G. Levine’s masterful new translation shows contemporary readers how Schulz, often compared to Proust and Kafka, reveals the workings of memory and consciousness.

[more]

Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Harvard University Press

Commerce with the Classics

Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers

Anthony Grafton

University of Michigan Press, 1997

The style of reading in Renaissance Europe, as seen in the margins of books and in the texts of Renaissance intellectuals themselves, is deftly charted in this welcome volume from Anthony Grafton. Growing out of the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures that Anthony Grafton gave at the University of Michigan in 1992, this book describes the interaction between books and readers in the Renaissance, as seen in four major case studies.

Humanists Alberti, Pico, Budé, and Kepler, all major figures of their time and now major figures in intellectual history, are examined in the light of their distinctive ways of reading. Investigating a period of two centuries, Grafton vividly portrays the ways in which book/scholar interactions--and the established traditions that were reflected in these interactions--were part of and helped shape the subjects' Humanistic philosophy. The book also indicates how these traditions have implications for the modern literary scene.

Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers illustrates the immense variety of the humanist readers of the Renaissance. Grafton describes life in the Renaissance library, how the act of reading was shaped by the physical environment, and various styles of reading during the time. A strong sense of what skilled reading was like in the past is built up through anecdotes, philological analysis, and documents from a wide variety of sources, many of them unpublished.

This volume will be of special interest to Renaissance and intellectual historians, students of Renaissance literature, and classicists who concern themselves with the afterlife of their texts.

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University.

[more]

Complacency

Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education

John T. Hamilton

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy.

In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn’s portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment.

The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were once treated as the foundation of learning, with everything else devolving from them. Hamilton investigates what this model of superiority, derived from the golden age of the classical tradition, shares with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considers how the qualitative methods of classics relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which often dismiss humanist subjectivity, legitimize self-sufficiency, and promote a fresh brand of academic complacency. In acknowledging the reduced status of classics in higher education today, he questions how scholarly striation and stagnation continue to bolster personal, ethical, and political complacency in our present era.

[more]

The Confidence-Man

His Masquerade

Herman Melville

Northwestern University Press, 2002

Long considered Melville's strangest novel, The Confidence-Man is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-nineteenth century America. A shape-shifting Confidence-Man approaches passengers on a Mississippi River steamboat and, winning over his not-quite-innocent victims with his charms, urges each to trust in the cosmos, in nature, and even in human nature--with predictable results. In Melville's time the book was such a failure he abandoned fiction writing for twenty years; only in the twentieth century did critics celebrate its technical virtuosity, wit, comprehensive social vision, and wry skepticism.

This scholarly edition includes a Historical Note offering a detailed account of the novel's composition, publication, reception, and subsequent critical history. In addition the editors present the twenty-six surviving manuscript leaves and scraps with full transcriptions and analytical commentary.

This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits. Based on collations of both editions publishing during Melville's lifetime, it incorporates 138 emendations made by the present editors. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

[more]

The Confidence-Man

Volume Ten, Scholarly Edition

Herman Melville

Northwestern University Press, 1984

Long considered Melville's strangest novel, The Confidence-Man is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-nineteenth century America. A shape-shifting Confidence-Man approaches passengers on a Mississippi River steamboat and, winning over his not-quite-innocent victims with his charms, urges each to trust in the cosmos, in nature, and even in human nature--with predictable results. In Melville's time the book was such a failure he abandoned fiction writing for twenty years; only in the twentieth century did critics celebrate its technical virtuosity, wit, comprehensive social vision, and wry skepticism.

This scholarly edition includes a Historical Note offering a detailed account of the novel's composition, publication, reception, and subsequent critical history. In addition the editors present the twenty-six surviving manuscript leaves and scraps with full transcriptions and analytical commentary.

This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits. Based on collations of both editions publishing during Melville's lifetime, it incorporates 138 emendations made by the present editors. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

[more]