Classics and National Cultures

Numerous nations have in one way or another engaged with the cultures of classical Greece and Rome. What impact does the classical past have on ideas of the nation, nationhood, nationality, and what effect does the national space have on classical culture? How has classical culture been imagined in various national traditions, what importance has it had within them, and for whom? This collection of essays by an international team of experts tackles the vexed relationship between Classics and national cultures, presenting essays on many regions, including China, India, Mexico, Japan, and South Africa, as well as Germany, Greece, and Italy. It poses new questions for the study of antiquity and for the history of nations and nationalisms.

1 - 'out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan': Ireland, the Classics and Independence
2 - Marooned Mandarins: Freud, Classical Education, and the Jews of Vienna
3 - Classical Culture for a Classical Country: Scholarship and the Past in Vincenzo Cuoco's Plato in Italy
4 - Classical Education and the Early American Democratic Style
5 - Mimicry and Classical Allusion in V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men
6 - Editing the Nation: Classical Scholarship in Greece, c.1930
7 - Eastern European Nations, Western Culture and the Classical Tradition
8 - The Cosmic Race and a Heap of Broken Images: Mexico's Classical Past and the Modern Creole Imagination
9 - Unbuilding the Acropolis in Greek Literature
10 - How to Build a National Epic: Digenes Akrites and the Song of Roland
11 - Heraclitus on the Highveld: The Universalism (Ancient and Modern) of T. J. Haarhoff
12 - Auerbach, Homer, and the Jews
13 - Contestatory Classics in 1920s China
14 - The New Alexandrian Library
15 - Translatio and Difference: Western Classics in Modern Japan
16 - Alexander Sikandar

Susan A. Stephens is Professor of Classics at Stanford University. Phiroze Vasunia is Reader in the Department of Classics at the University of Reading.