Chris Stray – författare

Oxford, the home of lost causes, the epitome of the world of medieval and renaissance learning in Britain, has always fascinated at a variety of levels: social, institutional, cultural. Its rival, Cambridge, was long dominated by mathematics, while Oxford's leading study was Classics. In this pioneering book, 16 leading authorities explore a variety of aspects of Oxford Classics in the last two hundred years: curriculum, teaching and learning, scholarly style, publishing, gender and social exclusion and the impact of German scholarship. Greats (Literae Humaniores) is the most celebrated classical course in the world: here its early days in the mid-19th century and its reform in the late 20th are discussed, in the latter case by those intimately involved with the reforms. An opening chapter sets the scene by comparing Oxford with Cambridge Classics, and several old favourites are revisited, including such familiar Oxford products as Liddell and Scott's "Greek-English Lexicon", the "Oxford Classical Texts", and Zimmern's "Greek Commonwealth". The book as a whole offers a pioneering, wide-ranging survey of Classics in Oxford.

This important collection of essays both contributes to the expanding field of classical reception studies and seeks to extend it. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it looks at a range of different genres (epic, novel, lyric, tragedy, political pamphlet). Within the published texts considered, the usual range of genres dealt with elsewhere is extended by chapters on books for children, and those in which childhood and memories of childhood are informed by antiquity; and also by a multi-genre case study of a highly unusual subject, Spartacus. "Remaking the Classics" also goes beyond books to dramatic performance, and beyond the theatre to radio - a medium of enormous power and influence from the 1920s to the 1960s, whose role in the reception of classics is largely unexplored. The variety of genres and of media considered in the book is balanced both by the focus on Britain in a specific time period, and by an overlap of subject-matter between chapters: the three chapters on twentieth-century drama, for example, range from performance strategies to post-colonial contexts.The book thus combines the consolidation of a field with an attempt to push it in new and exciting directions.

A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was a man of many apparent contradictions, most of which remain unresolved 150 years after his birth. At once a deeply emotive lyric poet and a precise and dedicated classical scholar, he achieved fame in both of these diverse disciplines. Although his poetic legacy has received much scholarly analysis, and yet more attention has been devoted to reconstructing his private life, no previous work has focused on Housman the classical scholar; yet it is upon scholarship that Housman most wished to leave his mark. This timely collection of papers by leading scholars reassesses the breadth and significance of Housman's contribution to classical scholarship in both his published and unpublished writings, and discusses how his mantle has been passed on to later generations of classicists.