Classical Literature on Screen

Martin M. Winkler is University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University, Virginia. His most recent books are Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo's New Light (Cambridge, 2009), The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology (2009), and Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology (2015). He has also published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews, and edited several essay collections on classical antiquity and film.

'In an era in which people seem to live eternally in the moment, books such as Classical Literature on Screen are required reading. Revealing his encyclopedic knowledge of both classical literature and classic (as well as contemporary) film, Winker looks at work from Pier Paolo Pasolini's and Jean Cocteau's visions of Oedipus and Pasolini's and Lars von Trier's interpretations of Medea to Spike Lee's update of Aristophanes' Lysistrata in his film Chi-Raq. The result is a book that constantly surprises and delights the reader. Here, Alfred Hitchcock meets Aristotelian poetics, John Ford is seen as the US's Virgil, and the film 300 is thoroughly dissected in a chapter titled 'Fascinating Ur-Fascism' (a nod to Susan Sontag). Winkler's readings are just as informed with classical antiquity as they are with the techniques of CGI in contemporary film, and his writing is lively and accessible. Illustrated throughout with an excellent series of stills, this is a fascinating, thrilling, continually surprising book.' Choice

• Part I. Creative Affinities: Ancient Texts and Modern Images: 1. The classical sense of cinema and the cinema's sense of antiquity; 2. Pasolini's and Cocteau's Oedipus: no quarrel of the ancients and the moderns in the cinema age; Part II. Elective Affinities: Tragedy and Comedy: 3. Medea's infanticide: how to present the unimaginable; 4. Striking beauty: Aristophanes' Lysistrat; Part III. Non-Elective Affinities: Plot and Theme: 5. 'More striking': Aristotelian poetics in Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Alfred Hitchcock; 6. John Ford, America's Virgil; Part IV. Counter-Affinities: Ideological and Narrative Distortions of History: 7. Fascinating ur-fascism: the case of 300; 8. Good Nero; or, the best intentions; Part V. Aesthetic Affinities: portraits of ladies: 9. Regal beauties in Franco Rossi's films of the Odyssey and Aenid; 10. Helen of Troy: is this the face that launched a thousand films?