This edited volume, the outcome of a series of papers delivered at the 6th Andalusian Congress of Classical Studies in 2014, sets out ‘to study the different means of adapting the figure of the ancient hero to new mass-consumption formats’ (p. vi) such as music, video games, comics, TV shows and film. In doing so, the volume positions itself within a larger movement in Classics that considers the reception of antiquity in popular culture as a subject of serious study and an essential part of democratising a field that has long been the preserve of the elite. Moreover, the book's appearance marks an important step forward in the broader recognition of the importance of such studies, as the volume represents one of the first book-length treatments of the subject (cf. G. Kovacs and C.W. Marshall [edd.], Classics and Comics [2011]; M. Winkler, Classical Literature on Screen [2017]; C. Rollinger [ed.], Classical Antiquity in Video Games [2020]).
The Hero Reloaded attempts to set itself apart from earlier work on the reception of antiquity in popular culture by taking on a broader scope. Rather than studying a particular ‘text’ or medium, the volume offers an account of classical reception in popular culture across and between a number of different media. To do so, the authors borrow the concept of ‘transmedia’ (pp. 4, 13, 55) from modern media studies, which seeks to acknowledge explicitly that fictional narratives can and do exist across a number of different media formats. While transmedia narratives are not exclusively a modern phenomenon – we might think of various collocations of text, image and performance in antiquity, the increasingly globalised and corporatised world of mass media in the twenty-first century has established transmediality as a fundamental characteristic of popular culture. By recognising the multiplicity and interconnectedness inherent in modern media, the authors move beyond a simplistic intertextual model for studying reception. In its stead, the contributors read the presence of antiquity in popular culture through the lens of ‘intermediality’, which, as its name suggests, seeks to understand how a wide variety of media forms and conventions speak to each other in fictional narratives. Such an approach allows for a more nuanced perspective on the reception of the classical hero – while modern representations of the hero need not ‘be linked to the original mythical story’ (p. xi), they still have the potential to rewrite and reframe their Greco-Roman predecessors.
This innovative approach is adopted both within and across the book's seven chapters. Not only do a number of chapters examine the intermediality of the narratives they discuss, but the volume as a whole functions as an exploration of the reception of the classical hero in different media. The value of moving from a text- to a media-centred approach can be seen particularly in Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2 A.M. Martín Rodríguez takes a deep dive into the various influences that shape the depiction of the eponymous hero of Disney's Hercules. Martín Rodríguez examines the film's reception of various ancient accounts of Hercules’ life and traces how his character is shaped by the generic conventions of mythically-themed films, superhero narratives and Disney films. Moreover, Martín Rodríguez shows the influence of this newly constituted Hercules on heroes in other popular franchises including Harry Potter. In Chapter 3 H. González-Vaquerizo focuses on the reception of classical heroes in heavy metal music. González-Vaquerizo shows that many characteristics of the Greco-Roman hero align with the broader message of heavy metal. This coincidence explains the frequency with which figures like Jason, Hercules or Ulysses appear in heavy metal songs and positions the classical hero as ‘a means of communication between present and historical attitudes’ (p. 70). In these analyses, Martín Rodríguez and González-Vaquerizo show that the persistence of classical antiquity in the twenty-first century is shaped by the conventions of popular culture in its mass media formats.
The volume also deploys mass media studies to sketch new frameworks for understanding the reception of antiquity in popular culture. For instance, in Chapter 4 Macías Villalobos outlines the distinctive interpretative problems inherent in the study of classical reception in video games, borrowing several theoretical insights from video game studies. Macías Villalobos argues that the experience of the video game user is fundamentally different from a reader in that players have ‘decisive influence on how the experience unfolds’ and that, as such, their experience ‘is only minimally predefined by the game designers’ (p. 75). The result is the rise of a new kind of hero who defies traditional chronological and physical limitations and whose character is partially determined by the user. In Chapter 7 López Gregoris charts the role that the classical hero plays in creating a new type of hero(ine) in Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic novel Fun Home. López Gregoris shows how Bechdel alludes to Odysseus/Ulysses, both visually and textually, to frame the main character's discovery of their sexual orientation as a ‘heroic journey’, thereby rewriting the famous epic as a queer feminist tour de force. For López Gregoris Bechdel's work represents the ways in which mass media has transformed and democratised the classical hero.
The volume stands to make an important intervention in the study of classical reception in popular culture. However, it is marred by a number of ideological and technical issues. One of the problems becomes apparent at the very outset of the introduction. In the opening paragraph the editors write that ‘the hero … is one of the greatest creations found in Classical thinking’ and that its legacy ‘remains vigorous in the contemporary Western imaginary’ (p. vi). The hero, of course, is not a creation of the Greco-Roman world – Gilgamesh, Samson, Moses, Aqhat and Rama predated, prefigured and even merged with their classical successors. Is there anything particular about classical heroes that distinguishes them in terms of their relevance to modern heroic typologies? To this end, the introduction would have benefited from more substantial engagement with what constitutes a Greco-Roman hero and what characters sit at the margins of these conventions. A more developed discussion of the problems that arise in attempting to define the classical hero may have helped individual authors to structure and economise their contributions.
Even more problematic is the claim in the same sentence about the existence of a coherent ‘contemporary Western imaginary’. Indeed, the evocation of a ‘Western imaginary’ in the context of transmedia studies, which explicitly recognises a more global bent to popular culture, is puzzling and leads to several theoretical and practical questions. For instance, how are we to make sense of the fact that many of the illustrations and graphics in popular culture are produced by ‘non-Western’ artists? How do the hermeneutics of interpretation change in light of the fact that mass media is received now more than ever in a wide variety of cultures, geographies and languages? Again, one wonders whether a comparative examination of different cultures and languages of heroism would have allowed for a more grounded analysis of the role of antiquity in the reinvention of the hero.
The failure to address these fundamental questions about the nature of the hero suggests that a firmer editorial hand may have been needed in the book's production. This too is reflected in a number of stylistic and technical aspects of the book. There are several chapters that favour the comprehensive over the convincing. In these pieces the reader is hit with a deluge of examples and comparisons (e.g. the listing of superheroes and their classical precedents [pp. 4–9]; off-the-cuff discussion of potential ‘hypertextual’ allusions in the Disney universe [pp. 39–41]) where a few well-chosen ones would have made the author's point more clearly. The quality of the copy-editing is also poor. The writing in the contributions is highly variable, with a number of authors displaying a tendency for overlong sentences with unclear referents (e.g. ‘Third, in each work analyzed here, the aim is a sense of total presence on the scene, of proximity to the object described, but the very excess and artificiality of what is narrated exposes the truth of its artistic nature, its non-reality, with its exhibition of literary mechanisms’ [p. 125]). Moreover, the volume is rife with mistakes that go beyond simple stylistic infelicities – the confusion of the possessive with the plural is rampant throughout as are missing articles and incorrect capitalisation. These unfortunate problems will prevent readers from fully engaging with an important work on a topic of increasing concern to scholars today.
