Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature

Madeleine Scherer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783110673883
• eBook ISBN: 9783110675191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see 'classical memories' as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural 'exports' in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like 'adaptation' and 'reception' could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memo ries, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

Index

• A False Spring
• Achilles
• Adorno
• Aeneas
• Aetherium sensum
• Afro-Greeks
• Anabasis
• Anchises
• Anticleia
• Arawak
• Archetype
• Ariès, Philippe
• Aristotle
• Armitage, David
• Assmann, Aleida
• Assmann, Jan
• Atwood, Margaret
• Augustus
• Bartlett, Frederic
• Big History
• Boland, Eavan
• Brathwaite, Kamau
• Calypso
• Canon
• Carr, Marina
• Charon
• Christian
• Christopher Columbus
• Circe
• Classical Reception
• Classical Tradition
• Cosmopolitanism
• Cultural Memory
• Dabydeen, David
• Dante
• Decontextualisation
• Deleuze, Gilles
• Demeter
• Derrida, Jacques
• Dido
• différance
• Eidolon
• Elegy
• Eliot, T.S.
• Epic
• Epitaph
• Erll, Astrid
• Escapism
• Eurydice
• Falconer, Rachel
• Forms, the
• Gallagher, Ellen
• Gilgamesh
• Glissant, Édouard
• Goldhill, Simon
• Graziosi, Barbara
• Greenwood, Emily
• Guyana
• Hall, Edith
• Hardwick, Lorna
• Harris, Wilson
• Hauntology / hauntological
• Headstone
• Heaney, Seamus
• Helen (of Troy)
• Heart of Darkness
• Hermes
• Hero’s Quest
• Homer
• Hutcheon, Linda
• Hybrid
• Iliad, the
• Inferno
• In Memoriam
• Intertextuality
• Jonestown
• Joyce, James
• Jung, C.G.
• Kleos
• Lachmann, Renate
• Latin
• Liquid Memories
• Lethe
• Lieux de mémoire
• locus memoriae
• Longley, Michael
• Longue durée
• Macintosh, Fiona
• Maes-Jelinek, Hena
• Martindale, Charles
• McConnell, Justine
• Memory, History, Forgetting
• Memory in a Global Age
• Memory Studies
• Memory-Driven Adaptation
• Memoryscape
• Metamorphoses
• Metaphysical
• Middle Passage
• Milieux de mémoire
• Milton
• Mnemosyne
• mnēsasthai emeio
• Multidirectional Memory
• Muse
• Myth of Er
• Mythosphere
• Naipaul, V.S.
• Nationalists (Irish)
• Negotiating with the Dead
• Nekyia
• Nora, Pierre
• Northern Ireland
• Nostalgia
• Nostos
• Object Lessons
• Odysseus
• Odyssey, the
• Omeros
• Orpheus
• Palace of the Peacock
• Patroclus
• Penelope
• Persephone
• Personal Helikon
• Plate, Liedeke
• Plato
• Postcolonial
• Refiguration
• Republic, the
• Resurrection on Sorrow Hill
• Ricœur, Paul
• Rigney, Ann
• Rilke, Reiner Maria
• Rhetoric
• Rhizome
• Romulus
• Rothberg, Michael
• Route
• Sandstone Keepsake
• Sappho
• Schema
• Schmidt, Siegfried
• Seeing Things
• Sibyl
• Sign
• Simonides of Ceos
• Socrates
• Soul-memory
• Specters of Marx
• St. Lucia
• Styx
• Teiresias
• Textual memory
• The Apparition
• The Bottle Garden
• The Butchers
• The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought
• The Four Banks of the River of Space
• The Ghost of Memory
• The Grauballe Man
• The Hebrides
• The Making of an Irish Goddess
• The Mask of the Beggar
• The Journey
• The Latin Lesson
• The Odyssey: A Stage Version
• The Riverbank Field
• The Stone Verdict
• The Underground
• Topoi
• Traditional Adaptation
• Trauma
• Trope
• Troubles, the
• Ulster
• Unionists (Irish)
• Virgil
• Walcott, Derek
• Wheel of Rebirth
• World Literature
• Yeats, W.B.
• Zong!

Notes

1

For a discussion of the terminological debate over the terms and schools of ‘classical reception’ and ‘the classical tradition’, see the beginning of the second chapter.

2

I am not suggesting here that the case studies that have been compiled are ‘complete’ or comprehensive – as far as that is even possible with such a wide-ranging reception history as that of classical antiquity. The focus on Anglophone classical reception at the detriment of, for instance, Hispanic reception has been identified and discussed by scholars like Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos (cf. ‘Seneca in Cuba: Gender, Race, and the Revolution in José Triana’s Medea en el espejo’, Romance Quarterly 59.1 (2012), 19 – 35 (p. 19)), and there are many other reception contexts that tend to be overlooked in favour of others.

3

Cf. Mathias Berek, Kollektives Gedächtnis, p. 37. Original: ‘Kultur entfaltet sich als ein menschliches Wirken, das immer zwischen den Polen Tradition und Innovation, zwischen reproduzierenden und kreativen Kräften oszilliert und dabei ein dynamisches Gleichgewicht zwischen diesen herstellt’. Berek is here referencing Ernst Cassirer, Versuch über den Menschen. Einführung in eine Philosophie der Kultur (Hamburg: Meiner 1996 (1990)), pp. 339 – 346.

4

Robert Hillyer, ‘The Lost Music’, in Hero’s Way: Contemporary Poems in the Mythic Tradition, ed. by John Alexander Allen (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1971), p. 375.

5

George Garrett, ‘Underworld’, in Hero’s Way: Contemporary Poems in the Mythic Tradition, ed. by John Alexander Allen (New Jer...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Methodology
• ‘Into my mind’s unsympathetic thought / They fade away’: Irish Poetry
• ‘The Sea is History’: Derek Walcott
• ‘The Haunted Womb of Imagination’: Wilson Harris
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index