The dissemination of classical material to children has long been a major form of popularization with far-reaching effects, although until very recently it has received almost no attention within the growing field of classical reception studies. This volume explores the ways in which children encountered the world of ancient Greece and Rome in Britain and the United States over a century-long period beginning in the 1850s, as well as adults' literary responses to their own childhood encounters with antiquity. Rather than discussing the role of classics in education, it focuses on books read for enjoyment, and on two genres of children's literature in particular: the myth collection and the historical novel. The tradition of myths retold as children's stories is traced in the work of writers and illustrators from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley to Roger Lancelyn Green and Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, while the discussion of historical fiction focuses particularly on the roles of nationality and gender in the construction of an ancient world for modern children. The book concludes with an investigation of the connections between childhood and antiquity made by writers for adults, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. Recognition of the fundamental role in children's literature of adults' ideas about what children want or need is balanced throughout by attention to the ways in which child readers have made such works their own. The formative experiences of antiquity discussed throughout help to explain why despite growing uncertainty about the appeal of antiquity to modern children, the classical past remains perennially interesting and inspiring.
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Product Details
Weight: 418g
Dimensions: 136 x 210mm
Publication Date: 09 Apr 2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication City/Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
ISBN13: 9780198859215
About Deborah H. RobertsSheila Murnaghan
Sheila Murnaghan earned an AB from Harvard University a BA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of North Carolina. She taught at Yale University from 1979 until 1990 then moved to the University of Pennsylvania where she is currently the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek. Her research focuses on ancient Greek epic and tragedy gender in classical culture and classical reception especially in the twentieth century. She is the author of Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (2nd ed.; Lexington Books 2011) and the co-editor of Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (Routledge 1998; with Sandra R. Joshel) Odyssean Identities In Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (Ohio State University Press 2014; with Hunter Gardner) and Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition (Ohio State University Press 2018; with Ralph M. Rosen). Deborah H. Roberts has a BA from Swarthmore College an MA from Stanford University and a PhD from Yale University. She is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Haverford College where she has taught since 1977. Her research has been primarily concerned with Greek tragedy classical reception and translation studies with a focus on the translation of Greek tragedy and of Greek and Latin texts once held to require expurgation. She is the author of Apollo and his Oracle in the Oresteia (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1984) co-editor of Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton University Press 1997; with Francis M. Dunn and Don Fowler) and translator of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (Hackett 2012) and Euripides' Ion (University of Pennsylvania Press 1999) and Andromache (University of Chicago Press 2013).