This book is for anyone interested in how classical culture has influenced creators of modern fantasy (MF) or continues to influence how it is interpreted. In this sequel to the well-received Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (2015; reviewed in CR 66 [2016], 584–6), Rogers and Stevens have again edited a diverse and stimulating volume that is the first of its kind in Anglophone scholarship. MF is regarded as spanning the ages of steam and information, and generously defined as a loose collection of thematic and stylistic tropes in which fairy tale, gothic horror and so-called ‘high fantasy’ (chivalric lore-worlds like those of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin) all have a place. Prose fiction is the focus, though three of the fourteen chapters address other media. The editors and contributors include nearly all the best-known writers in MF, while also casting light on less familiar source material.

This book fills a hole of fantastical shape between more familiar territories. The introduction's elegant hook is the title page of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), which in the second edition gains lines from Horace the poet, describing ‘fantasy’ as worthless and disordered art (vanae fingentur species, Hor. Ars P. 7–8). The editors are upfront about the problem/opportunity that MF cannot be readily defined by its content. They are equally candid about the fact that MF normally harks back to unclassical pasts, especially ‘false Medievalism’, a label for high fantasy in the second of the book's four sections. The book is not only about classical antiquity influencing MF, but also about commonalities between the two (p. 21). Finally, there are signs that MF had to fit around its close relative science fiction (SF); the predecessor volume had already claimed Lucian's True History as SF, though this one absorbs H.P. Lovecraft as MF in return. Several contributors argue strenuously for the relevance of classical antiquity, mainly its literature, to a modern genre that rarely advertises such a heritage. The subheadings haul in the same direction: ‘Classical Apparitions in (Pre-)Modern Fantasy’, ‘False Medievalism and Other Ancient Fantasies’, ‘Children and (Other) Ancient Monsters’ and ‘(Post)Modern Fantasies of Antiquity’.

Variety begins its reign in the four-chapter opening section. The Song of Ice and Fire novels (televised as Game of Thrones) that book-end the collection are undeniably this decade's most successful MF franchise, even though their author never studied antiquity and drew primarily on the historical and high fantasy novels of Sir Walter Scott, Maurice Druon and Tolkien. J. Weiner's opening chapter argues that ‘high fantasy is, in many respects, modern-day epic in prose’ (p. 26), rather like when Servius (ad Virg. Aen. 1.382) asserted that Lucan's epic was history in verse. Weiner bases the claim not only on modern usage of the adjective ‘epic’ but on the shared conventions of archaism, military heroics, the supernatural and political themes. He makes space for MF within Aristotle's definition of epic and, turning to the ‘Great Divide’ between canon-topping highbrow art (such as epic) and mere popular entertainment (such as fantasy novels), concludes by asking whether this hierarchy should be re-examined. In a balanced and valuable chapter on enchantment and parody in the fantasy fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, C. Flugt demonstrates that, even though Germanic folktale and Norse myth were more prominent in the development of the genre, allusions to classical authors (notably imitations of Lucian's True History) had their place. Turning to a different medium, G.S. Gessert's chapter paints a similar story: from Victorian illustrations inspired by the pre-Raphaelites, a characteristic art style emerged for ‘faerie’ books, such as those of Andrew Lang and then MF, and argues in turn that pre-Raphaelite art shaped the tastes of writers such as Tolkien. She argues that this art style was not straightforwardly Romantic, but also ‘classical’, or rather classicising, since visual conventions from antiquity are present. A two-page addendum surveys several MF illustrators of recent years keeping that pre-Raphaelite sensibility alive. This section concludes with a radically different subject – the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. R.P. Krämer masterfully demonstrates that Lovecraft's tastes and values arose partly through his lifelong admiration of ancient Rome and Greece. His fertile and prolific imagination, verbose style and misanthropy all owed something to classical antiquity, which both shaped his solitary imaginings (at seven he played at being a Roman) and fuelled his intellectual snobbery (at twelve he scorned ‘the Christian herd’ at Sunday school). Lovecraft studies needed this chapter. It could only be improved by expansion: for example, using S.T. Joshi's reconstruction of Lovecraft's library, we could seek the fingerprints of specific texts he owned, and more generally his classical tastes could be situated within a Victorianism manifesting as Anglophilia, racism and admiration for military men and explorers. But this chapter does all that could be asked.

The second section addresses Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Stevens compares underworld-like themes in The Hobbit with the mythical underworlds of Virgil and Homer. Bilbo is a ‘katabant’ (katabat?) in that he contends with orcs, Gollum and Smaug in hidden caverns beneath mountains. In this sense Tolkien's Germanic underworlds in The Hobbit resonate with classical ones, though scenes in his other works seem relevant, for example the barrow-wight and balrog encounters in Lord of the Rings. J.T. Winkle's chapter on C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader finds ancient models for the transformation of Eustace into a dragon, which precipitates a moral makeover. These are Phaedrus’ tale of the serpent, the ring of Gyges and, in particular, the transformation and religious conversion of Apuleius’ antihero Lucius. M. Folch's chapter on Lewis and Apuleius is completely different, using Bakhtin's concept of the ‘chronotope’ to parse cultural allusions in Till We Have Faces, Lewis's reworking of Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche episode. The setting of Glome is mapped as the gloaming between cultures (p. 178): ‘a condensation of Greco-Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Hebraic, and Judeo-Christian time and space’ (perhaps Near Eastern too, if the sounds of the names Ungit, Shennit and Ishtra echo Ugarit, Tanit and Ishtar). There is a clever reading (pp. 183–4) of the metaliterary event when the narrator Orual responds to the ‘wrong’ Apuleian version of her story.

Young audiences are the connecting theme of Chapters 8–11, starting with S.A. Brown's excellent survey of classical deities in numerous children's authors. It reveals patterns that extend into adult MF, for example Neil Gaiman's adult-oriented American Gods. The incongruity of modern settings is shown to be ‘a strong driver of comedy’ (p. 207), and whether benign or malign, the gods are simply superhumans rather than embodiments of good or evil. Next, Rogers takes a playful tone in a reading of the Harry Potter heptalogy. The final book Deathly Hallows has two epigraphs, one of them from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, which has prompted scholars to find the tragedian as an underlying presence in the series (J. Granger [2008]; A. Mills [2009]). Rogers asserts that Aeschylus is ‘a form of knowledge that structures the HP series’ (p. 227), using the reception model of ‘ghosting’, which is based on a ‘hunch’ (p. 216) rather than demonstrable parallels. Thus Dumbledore's speech against tyrants may ‘ghost’ the Oresteia, or perhaps Prometheus Bound (pp. 219–20). A. Syson points out Virgilian and Aeschylean aspects of the Harpies in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, which adds a classical counterpoint to Pullman's primary influences, William Blake and John Milton. Many of Syson's findings coincide with those of O. Hodkinson, whose 2016 chapter on Greek mythology in the series was evidently not yet available. E.A. Manwell's chapter, the only contribution about an animated movie rather than print media, compares Pixar's Brave (dir. Andrews et al. 2012) to the bear-cult at Brauronia in ancient Greece, since both enact a girl's coming-of-age though a temporary transformation into a bear. This is another case of ‘ghosting’, since neither writer had heard of the bear-cult (p. 257), and it is the girl's mother, not the girl, who becomes a bear.

The final section includes works by three living authors. S.-M. Eccleston meticulously examines Anne Carson's imagined dialogues with the early Greek love-elegist Mimnermos, ‘The Brainsex Paintings’ (1995). Eccleston begins and ends using the terms ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’, but admits that the supernatural is downplayed in this free-verse fiction, which is in part an adapted translation of Mimnermos’ surviving fragments. J.A. Rea's chapter is about Jo Graham's 2008 novel Black Ships, a lesser-known example of the recent wave of female-centred retellings of classical texts, including those of Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker and Madeline Miller. In Black Ships a girl named Gull has prophetic visions that guide Neas (Aeneas) on his travels, until, after going to war against Turnus and the ‘Rotoli’, he finally settles down, which for Rea reflects the desires of the post-9/11 era. The chapter is limited to Black Ships, though Gull and Neas were reincarnated as Charmian and Agrippa for a 2009 sequel, The Hand of Isis; Graham's subsequent output has been largely dedicated to Stargate: Atlantis novelisations. A. Haimson Lushkov's closing chapter draws connections between Game of Thrones and Virgil's Aeneid through a shared ‘language of the heroic’ (p. 309), which makes it unimportant whether G.R.R. Martin knows the Aeneid (p. 311). A typical example is the comparison of Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell with Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus. Lushkov has explored classical parallels at monograph length in You Win or You Die: The Ancient World of Game of Thrones (2017).

At the time of writing, the co-editors of this volume and its SF predecessor are expanding their groundbreaking trajectory with Frankenstein and Its Classics (with J. Weiner, 2018; reviewed in CR 69 [2019], xxx) and Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2019). The contents of this book are diverse in subject matter, and methodology, but scattered with rewarding insights, and reach their difficult goal of mapping new territory in classical reception studies.