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Classics for all : reworking antiquity in mass culture / edited by Dunstan Lowe and Kim Shahabudin.
- Format:
- Book
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Antiquities in popular culture--Congresses.
- Antiquities in popular culture.
- Popular culture--Classical influences--Congresses.
- Popular culture.
- Genre:
- Conference papers and proceedings.
- Physical Description:
- xviii, 287 pages ; 22 cm : illustrations
- Place of Publication:
- Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.
- Summary:
- 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.
- Contents:
- Part I Ancient Worlds, Modern Audiences
- "Terrible, Excruciating, Wrong-Headed And Ineffectual": The Perils and Pleasures of Presenting Antiquity to a Television Audience / Bettany Hughes 2
- Gutting the Argonautica? How to Make Jason and the Argonauts Suitable for Children / Helen Lovatt 17
- Louis MacNeice's Radio Classics: "All So Unimaginably Different"? / Amanda Wrigley 39
- Part II Re-Purposing Antiquity
- Playing With Antiquity: Videogame Receptions of the Classical World / Dunstan Lowe 64
- "I Fear it's Potentially Like Pompeii": / Disaster, Mass Media and the Ancient City, Joanna Paul 91
- Total War and Total Realism: A Battle for Antiquity in Computer Game History / Cristian Ghita, Georgios Andrikopoulos 109
- Part III Classica Erotica
- "Only Spartan Women Give Birth To Real Men": Zack Snyder's 300 and the Male Nude / Susanne Turner 128
- "Dickus Maximus": Rome as Pornotopia / Gideon Nisbet 150
- "This Way to the Red Light District": The Internet Generation Visits the Brothel in Pompeii / Kate Fisher, Rebecca Langlands 172
- Part IV Fantasising the Classics
- Ancient Mythology and Modern Myths: Hercules Conquers Atlantis (1961) / Kim Shahabudin 196
- Hell Hath no Fury like a Dissatisfied Viewer: Audience Responses to the Presentation of the Furies in Xena: Warrior Princess and Charmed / Amanda Potter 217
- Crossing Classical Thresholds: Gods, Monsters and Hell Dimensions in the Whedon Universe / Paula James 237.
- Notes:
- Papers from a conference Classics hell : re-presenting antiquity in mass cultural media, University of Reading, April 2007.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Local Notes:
- Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Orville H. Bullitt Classics Fund.
- ISBN:
- 9781443801201
- 1443801208
- OCLC:
- 310392490
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