Böcker i Classical Diaspora-serien

The teaching and research of the classics in South Africa are deeply rooted in the racial, political and educational inequalities which have characterised the country's turbulent history. Michael Lambert opens three windows on to this history, using the creation of identities as his theoretical lens.

An investigation into the teaching of classics in the colonial education of West Africa in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Employing the idea of interculturality to study Middle Eastern adaptations of Greek tragedy from the turn of 20th century until the present day, this book first explores the earlier phase of the development of Greek classical reception in Middle Eastern theatre. It then moves to focus on modern Arabic, Persian and Turkish adaptations of Greek tragedy both in the early post-colonial and contemporary periods in the MENA and in Europe. Case by case, this book examines how the classical sources are reworked and adapted, as well as how they engage with interculturality, hybridisation and the circulation of aesthetics and models. At the same time, it explores the implications and consequences of expressing socio-political concerns through classical Greek sources. While Muslim thinkers and translators introduced Greek philosophy - in particular Aristotle's Poetics - to the West in the Middle Ages, adaptations of Greek tragedies only appeared in the MENA region at the very beginning of the 20th century. For this reason, the development of Greek tragedy in the Middle East is difficult to disentangle from colonialism and cultural imperialism. Encompassing language differences and offering for the first time a broad approach on the Middle-Eastern reception of Greek tragedy, this book produces a renewed focus on a fascinating aspect of the classical tradition.

This book approaches the relationship of modern Hungarian culture to classical heritage from the various viewpoints of identity politics, education, translation history, scholarship, and its impact on literature. Péter Hajdu examines the cultivation of the classics as an intellectual framework and crucial ingredient of the western aspect of Hungarian national identity. When the Hungarian nation building project developed ideas of national identity, it necessarily incorporated the historical narrative according to which the Hungarians arrived at their current homeland in the Middle Ages, and only later did it adopt European culture. The duplicity of a mostly imagined Asian, pagan, barbaric or nomadic and a Western, Christian, civilized identity, deeply rooted in European culture, has played and continues to play a role in the Hungarian discourse. Hajdu also studies the gradual disappearance of classics from the Hungarian school education since the 19th century, which has been accompanied by fervid political debates. However, over this period, translations of classical texts paradoxically became more frequent and popular with the decline of a classical education, even though fewer readers had access to the original texts. Despite this change, the translation strategies tended to remain school-bound. The knowledge of classical literature still leaves traces on Hungarian literature, which Hajdu explores using examples from 19th-century novels and contemporary poetry. This book sheds light on a topic of classical reception that has remained largely unexplored in this part of Europe, but one which has an incredibly rich history, culture, and literary tradition.