This issue sees five volumes from IMAGINES – Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts. This series, published by Bloomsbury and edited by Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Martin Lindner, developed from a series of conferences starting in 2007, and has so far produced fourteen books, including both edited volumes and monographs. In keeping with the editors’ aims to work from an anti-hierarchal approach to culture, the books under discussion elaborate on a range of media, without distinguishing between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.Footnote ¹

Screening Love and War in ‘Troy: Fall of a City’ is an in-depth analysis of a 2018 television series dramatizing the Trojan War, from the Judgement of Paris to the Trojan Horse.Footnote ² The editors, Antony Augoustakis and Monica S. Cyrino, have surely done well to publish a scholarly book of fifteen chapters so (relatively) soon after the show's broadcast, and the timeliness of this publication can be perceived in its response to such topical issues, particularly regarding race and gender. Rebecca Futo Kennedy's chapter on ‘Racist Reactions to Black Achilles’, for example, examines how the casting of the Black British actor of Ghanaian heritage David Gyasi as one of antiquity's greatest heroes generated a hostile response. With the caveat that some sources of anonymous comments were simply too horrendous to engage with, Kennedy analyses a number of online responses that criticize the representation of Achilles as Black. This is contextualized with other recent cultural productions that cast people of colour in what may be expected to be White roles, and vice versa, and discussed alongside theories of racialization. Meanwhile, chapters by Kirsten Day, Thomas E. Jenkins, and Walter Duvall Penrose, Jr, all discuss the thorny topic of applying modern attitudes towards gender and sexuality to the ancient story. Twenty-first-century stereotypes (as in ‘Heroic Hairstyles and Manless Amazons at Troy’, Penrose), modern attitudes towards polyamory and queerness (‘Queering Troy: Freedom and Sexuality’, Jenkins), and the figure of the empowered woman (‘Pussy Politics: Women and Power in the Homeric Patriarchy’, Day) all appear, once again making the scholarship very immediate.

Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World is similar in its attempt to establish links between contemporary issues and the classical tradition.Footnote ³ This collection of essays, edited by Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Anja Wieber, clearly signals some of its ideological priorities in its citation of ‘Orientalism’, for which concept they are drawing from Edward Said's highly influential work. A foundational principle of the work as a whole is that women who may be deemed ‘Oriental’ experience a ‘double estrangement’; in that they are ‘perceived as Others to a normative, masculine, Western point of view, modern reception has structurally aligned these two forms of Alterity’ (1). Among chapters on the portrayals of a range of women, including Semiramis, Cleopatra, Theodora, and perhaps more unexpectedly, Fulvia, is Irene Madreiter's chapter on the Sāsānid queen Šīrīn. Madreiter discusses how her reception in modern-day Iran has been impacted by the revolution of 1979; and recent debates over modest dress and 9/11 also make an appearance (198, 194). This is but one among many chapters that speak to contemporary issues, but perhaps the most striking allusion is in the final essay. Beate Wager-Hasel, writing ‘Instead of a Conclusion’, ends the book with a critique of Mary Beard's highly popular Women & Power (2017), arguing that ‘Her view is deeply Eurocentric’ (209). Wager-Hasel's provocation is a challenge to all readers to review their own assumptions, and demonstrates the relevance of this title as a whole.

The introduction of Ancient Violence in the Modern Imagination is perhaps more theoretical than the majority of the chapters, seeking as it does to demonstrate how conceptions of violence differ according to both socio-historical context and academic discipline.Footnote ⁴ However, it too claims to make an intervention in current debate, with Irene Berti arguing that not only is there an ‘increasing intensification in the violence on display in modern media’ but that antiquity's bloody associations are frequently exploited in this process (5). Interventions are also made regarding PTSD by Oskar Aguado Cantabrana's and Anastasia Bakogianni's chapters on ‘Screening the Face of Roman Battle: Violence Through the Eyes of Soldiers in Film’ and ‘Performing Violence and War Trauma: Ajax on the Silver Screen’ respectively. Additionally, issues of race and identity are explored in Maria Cecilia de Miranda Nogueira Coelho's chapter ‘Kseni, the Foreigner: A Brazilian Medea in Action’, and Zoa Alonso Fernández's ‘Choreographies of Violence: Spartacus from the Soviet Ballet to the Global Stage’. Kseni was created by ‘Jocy de Oliveira, a prize-winning pianist born in 1936, who in the 1960s transformed her career as an international classical concert musical to become Brazil's first multimedia artist’ (93). In a country with its own complex colonial history, de Oliveira produced an opera about an ancient barbarian and witch. On the other hand, Fernández's chapter culminates in an investigation into the celebrated Cuban-British ballet dancer Carlos Acosta's portrayal of Spartacus, following a long-standing ‘discourse of racial oppression’ around the ancient slave (122).

As for The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination, the zeitgeist is most apparent in Margaret Day Elsner's ‘From Gorgons to Goop: Scent Therapy and the Smell of Transformation in Antiquity and the Holistic Health Movement’.Footnote ⁵ The controversial practice of vaginal steaming is discussed here in light of both its Galenic and Paltrowesque incarnations. As Adeline Grand-Clément and Charlotte Ribeyrol's introduction demonstrates, though, the senses have gathered increasing amounts of scholarly attention across humanistic and literary studies. The intersection here of smell and classical reception has led to some fascinating and original analyses, from several practice-based ones to some unexpected encounters with art and literature. One example of the latter is Catherine Maxwell's ‘“Unguent from a Carven Jar”: Odour and Perfume in Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams (1907)’. The practice-based chapters include the replication of ancient perfume recipes and historical re-enactment. Amandine Declerq describes in an interview her attempt to make the Egyptian scent kyphi, commenting on the problems of interpreting ancient recipes, and speculates that, without the ‘same sensory reference points’, access to the ancients’ experience of kyphi is lost (200). ‘“Untarnished Experiences?” Re-enactors and Their Appraisal of Smell as a Gateway into the Ancient World’, by Martin Lindner, finds that some historical re-enactors see smell as an authentic mediator between the ancient world and their own. Lindner also comments on his own methodology in researching this, usefully reminding us just how elusive sense perception can be.

The Smells and Senses of Antiquity is by no means the only volume in this series to share an interest in practice. Ancient Violence in the Modern Imagination also investigates the experience of historical re-enactors. Carla Scilabra's interview with the historical costumier Danielle Fiore, ‘Re-Enacting Soldiers and Dressing Roman Women’, is an interesting introduction to the world of historical re-enactment and explores some of the different ways people connect with the ancient world. By contrast, Jonatan Pérez Mostazo, in ‘From Ancient Violence to Modern Celebration: Complex Receptions of Ancient Conquest Wars in Las Guerras Cántabras Festival’, explores how the Roman conquest of Cantabria is an important focus of civic activities to this day. On a different tack, Maria G. Castello discovers in ‘Drawing Reception’ that the cartoonist Fabio Ruotolo balances different considerations in his depiction of ancient soldiers and is particularly influenced by the US soldiers of the Vietnam War. Screening Love and War also learns from professionals. It has garnered a foreword by the series’ executive producer Derek Wax, as well as the business coach Brian Cooke, who comments on ‘Lessons for Leaders: Destiny, Devotion, and Self-Deception’, arguing that leadership lessons can be learned from the story of the Trojan War. All of these chapters can be seen as illustrating the ongoing and widespread relevance of the classical tradition, and in many ways are a counterpart to the explicit consideration of contemporary issues.

The last IMAGINES volume to be discussed here differs from the others in that it is a monograph. Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity, by Marco Benoît Carbone, is an innovative investigation into the relationship between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Odyssey and the southern Italian town of Scilla.Footnote ⁶ It is unusual for a classical reception book in that it features extensive autoethnography by the author, who navigates between his roles as scholar and former resident and between the places of England (his current home) and southern Italy (his birthplace). In that sense, it might be said to share with the above books an interest in (inter)national, ethnic, and regional identities. Scilla, thought by some to be the real location of the Odyssean Scylla, was part of Magna Graecia. In Chapter 7, Carbone also explains that there is a transcontinental Mediterranean identity that features: in an impoverished area, these claims to fame persist in various efforts to attract tourism, and Carbone interviews tourists and tradesmen alike. There is an urgency to his depiction of an area that has been afflicted by the uneven economic development that persists across Europe and ultimately adds to this work's frequently poignant and reflective tone.

While these publications span a vast range of topics, they all demonstrate a desire to locate antiquity at the heart of society's most pressing issues. Moreover, they cover a highly diverse range of sources and material. All books engage seriously and in detail with the ancient material, but they also cover a vast range of modern material. Screening Love and War is a fully multimedia endeavour, while the remainder explore dance, theatre, manga, advertising, art, cinema, and literature. There is something new to be found in every one.

Another common theme to this issue's publications is twentieth-century literature. Virginia Woolf's Mythic Method, by Amy C. Smith, is part of the Classical Memories/Modern Identities series, edited by Paul Allen Miller and Richard H. Armstrong.Footnote ⁷ Smith looks at some of Woolf's most well-known works and argues that their relationship to ancient myth is characterized by a specific approach, in that her ‘mythic method’ is ‘paratactic’. Using the syntactical practice of favouring coordinate clauses over those of the subordinate kind, Smith shows that Woolf often distributes mythic aspects across situations and characters in a manner that allows open and inconclusive interpretation. This refusal to cultivate hierarchies extends to her adoption of classical scholarship. Although deeply influenced by the pioneering work of Jane Harrison, Smith asserts that Woolf both utilizes and implicitly critiques Harrison's views. This is particularly plain in Chapter 4's discussion of To the Lighthouse. Although Harrison's views on matriarchal religion appear present in the novel, ‘Woolf maintains critical distance about these theories’ utopian potential in the modern era’ (116). This monograph is useful to those familiar with Woolf's oeuvre or literary modernism in general, but it is also relevant to those interested in classics and the political context of the early twentieth century.

Gregory Baker takes a somewhat different approach to literary modernism in Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism, which is part of the Classics after Antiquity series, edited by Alastair Blanshard, Shane Butler, and Emily Greenwood.Footnote ⁸ The unifying theme of his study is not a method but an ideological struggle: namely, Celtic nationalism in the United Kingdom. Baker has chosen to focus on two authors from Ireland (W. B. Yeats and James Joyce), one from Wales (David Jones), and one from Scotland (Hugh MacDiarmid, the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve). Joyce is probably one of the most important classicizing authors from this period, and it is enjoyable to see an analysis of his work alongside Welsh and Scottish authors. As such, while Baker refers to some of the typical subjects for classicizing modernism that also appear in Smith, such as Nietzsche, Jane Harrison, and fascism, one of the most notable aspects of this work is that it places equal weight on understanding the state of Celtic letters as it does Classics. To that extent, it is characteristic of Baker to apply close-reading techniques and to explore the mechanics and ideologies of translation, oscillating between the classical languages, English, and Gaelic, among writers with varying degrees of understanding.

Carson/Antiquity, edited by Laura Jansen, makes a similar investment in questions of translation as it offers twenty chapters on the work of Anne Carson.Footnote ⁹ Carson's considered and individual approach is explored from various angles, with a particular interest on lacunae and even, in the case of Jansen's own contribution, ‘residue’, which is way of thinking about the classical Nachleben that I confess I had not previously considered. This volume is interested in appraising Carson's work through her various identities as scholar, poet, artist, and translator – or ‘transcreator’, as Susan Bassnett suggests. Advantageously then, contributors come from a range of backgrounds, with poets writing alongside specialists in Classics, English, and translation studies. For all the nuance and involved detail that abounds, this book is a curiously meditative and even personal read, perhaps due to a prose style that is sometimes playful, sometimes contemplative, but seems as invested in the games of identity, authorship, and allusion as Carson herself. In this sense, Carson/Antiquity, Amy C. Smith, and Gregory Baker convey a sense of the writers as vivid figures in their own right against the shifting sands of a constantly reinterpreted antiquity.

It could be argued, therefore, that the effort by scholarship to evoke the mysterious circumstances and methods by which creators resuscitate the ancient past is an attempt at revivification in itself and, often, an exploration of identity. However, while there are numerous instances in the books I have discussed that express both the problem of knowing the past and the creative ways in which people may work to overcome it, this struggle is productive. Classical reception studies is generating ever more original and sophisticated connections, between academia and the world outside it, and across different media, space, and time.