Reading the Past Across Space and Time

Brenda Deen Schildgen is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, USA. The author of more than fifty articles focused on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as Chaucer, Augustine, and biblical hermeneutics, her most recent books include Divine Providence, A History: Bible, Virgil, Orosius, Augustine, and Dante; Heritage or Heresy: Destruction and Preservation of Art and Architecture in Europe; and Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature.Ralph Hexter is Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Caliornia, Davis, USA, where he also serves as Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor. He has published on Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the reception of Ovid, and the intersections of the history of scholarship and sexuality.

• Introduction: “Reading the Past Across Space and Time: Receptions and World Literature,” Brenda Deen Schildgen and Ralph Hexter.- Epic Receptions.- Chapter 1 “Epic Worlds,” Ralph Hexter.- Chapter 2 “Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents,” Wai Chee Dimock.- Chapter 3 “Wheels Working Together: The Popol Wuj and Time Commences in Xibalbá as Markers of a Maya Cosmovision,”Arturo Arias.- Chapter 4 “Reception Configurations: The case of European Epic in India,” Brenda Deen Schildgen.- Chapter 5 “Formal Experiments in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad,” Zina Giannopoulou.- Greek Philosophical Receptions.- Chapter 6 “Disagreement and Reception: Peripatetics Responding to the Stoic Challenge,” Jan Szaif.- Chapter 7 “ ‘Now we must consider that some of the ancients discovered the truth’”: Reception and Antiquity in Ancient Neoplatonism,” Michael Griffin.- Chapter 8 “Reading and Commenting on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Arabic,” Uwe Vagelpohl.- Drama and Receptions.- Chapter 9 “A Third Antike: Hans Henny Jahnn’s Medea and the Introduction of the ‘Sumerian’ to Modern German Literature,” Adam Siegel.- Chapter 10 “American Bushido: A Kabuki Play Transplanted,” Robert Borgen.- Chapter 11 “Tamil Translation, French Orientalism, and Indian Dramatic Traditions in Louis Jacolliot’s La Devadassi (1868)”, Kristen Bergman Waha.- Lyric Receptions.- Chapter 12 “Goethe’s Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten: Vernacular Universal, Erotica Sinica, and the Temporality of Nachträglichkeit,” Chunjie Zhang.- Chapter 13 “The Mediterranean Metaphor,” Kevin Batton.- Chapter 14 “Inventing China: The American Tradition of Translating Chinese Poetry,” Michelle Yeh.- Politics and Sociology of Reception.- Chapter 15 “Meaning, Reception, and the Use of the Classics: Theoretical Considerations in the Chinese Context,” Zhang Longxi.- Chapter 16 “The Sociology of Reception,” Gisèle Sapiro.- Bibliography.