Daniel Orrells – författare

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the classical world has been seen as foundational and exemplary to Western civilization. However, the Greeks never invaded and colonised western and northern Europe the way the Romans did, and, conversely, Greece was a difficult place to reach for modern travellers well into the nineteenth century. Inevitably, therefore, the links with ancient Greece were a product of the imagination: an exemplary civilization, in its politics, arts, and culture. There was one problem, however: the Greeks, it seemed, enjoyed pederastic relations. And not only this: one of Athens'' most famous teachers, Socrates, was attracted to boys. Daniel Orrells offers a fresh, original examination of how modern thinkers in Germany and Britain, who were so invested in a model of history that directly traced the European present back to an ancient Greek past, negotiated the tricky issue of ancient Greek pederasty.

The appearance of Martin Bernal''s Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the ''fabrication of Greece'' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals'' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal''s claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present.Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the classical world has been seen as foundational and exemplary to Western civilization. However, the Greeks never invaded and colonised western and northern Europe the way the Romans did, and, conversely, Greece was a difficult place to reach for modern travellers well into the nineteenth century. Inevitably, therefore, the links with ancient Greece were a product of the imagination: an exemplary civilization, in its politics, arts, and culture. There was one problem, however: the Greeks, it seemed, enjoyed pederastic relations. And not only this: one of Athens' most famous teachers, Socrates, was attracted to boys. Daniel Orrells offers a fresh, original examination of how modern thinkers in Germany and Britain, who were so invested in a model of history that directly traced the European present back to an ancient Greek past, negotiated the tricky issue of ancient Greek pederasty.

The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present.Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.

A prominent francophone thinker and writer from sub-Saharan Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe is known for his interdisciplinary spirit in bridging Western and African modes of knowledge and in critiquing a range of disciplines, from the classics and philosophy to anthropology and comparative literature. Though Mudimbe has been regarded as an essential postcolonial thinker—on par with more canonized figures such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha— The Mudimbe Reader offers for the first time a ground-breaking work of modern intellectual African history that includes new translations of essays which had previously been in French and out of print.Constituting an intellectual history of the humanities in the late twentieth century from an African intellectual’s point of view, The Mudimbe Reader provides an introduction and a comprehensive bibliography that frame four thematic gatherings of Mudimbe’s writings. Part 1 bears witness to Mudimbe’s attempts, as a university professor in the new nation-state of Zaire, to balance the postindependence discourse of authenticity with his training in Western philosophy and philology. Part 2 focuses on Mudimbe’s exploration of racial, ethnic, and religious discourses to reflect upon postcolonialism in Zaire and in the United States. In the third part, Mudimbe interrogates ancient Greek and Latin texts as a strategy to engage the legacy of antiquity for European and African modernity. Finally, the book concludes by focusing on visual culture and Mudimbe’s recurring attempt to elucidate how African ""primitiveness"" has been constructed, challenged, dismissed, and reinvented from the Renaissance to the present day.

Sex is fundamental to society. We cannot think about politics, power, identity or culture without also thinking about sexuality. Despite this, the scientific study of sexual behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon. Doctors, legal experts and other intellectuals have all pondered challenging questions in an attempt to stay abreast of the latest sexual research. How might we separate talking about sex scientifically from discussing and consuming pornography? How do we speak objectively about desire and pleasure? And how do the words that we use to talk about sex affect what we are able to say about it? Such questions increasingly inform public discourse across a variety of media. Showing how ancient words and ideas have left a significant imprint on present-day ideas about sex, Daniel Orrells offers a bold new narrative of how the scientific study of sexuality came into being.Uncovering the intriguing story of how the obscene and erotic verse of Roman epigram and love poetry became the sanitised language of nineteenth-century sexual science, this divertingly readable book demonstrates how the reception of both Latin and Greek texts was central to the development of modernmsexology and psychoanalysis. Ranging from Sappho, Catullus and Martial to Michel Foucault, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, the author reveals just how profoundly classics has shaped the landscape of sexual identity that we inhabit today.

Sex is fundamental to society. We cannot think about politics, power, identity or culture without also thinking about sexuality. Despite this, the scientific study of sexual behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon. Doctors, legal experts and other intellectuals have all pondered challenging questions in an attempt to stay abreast of the latest sexual research. How might we separate talking about sex scientifically from discussing and consuming pornography? How do we speak objectively about desire and pleasure? And how do the words that we use to talk about sex affect what we are able to say about it? Such questions increasingly inform public discourse across a variety of media. Showing how ancient words and ideas have left a significant imprint on present-day ideas about sex, Daniel Orrells offers a bold new narrative of how the scientific study of sexuality came into being.Uncovering the intriguing story of how the obscene and erotic verse of Roman epigram and love poetry became the sanitised language of nineteenth-century sexual science, this divertingly readable book demonstrates how the reception of both Latin and Greek texts was central to the development of modernmsexology and psychoanalysis. Ranging from Sappho, Catullus and Martial to Michel Foucault, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, the author reveals just how profoundly classics has shaped the landscape of sexual identity that we inhabit today.

Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers, and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts.With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture - theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.

Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers, and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts.With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture - theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.

Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers, and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts. With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-François Hugues d''Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture - theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.

Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers, and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts. With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-François Hugues d''Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture - theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.

Richard Marsh was one of the most popular and prolific authors of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. His bestselling The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A prolific author within a range of genres including Gothic, crime, humour and romance, Marsh produced stories about shape-shifting monsters, morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life. However, while Marsh’s work appealed to a public greedy for sensationalist fiction, both the cultural elite of the day and twentieth-century literary critics looked askance at his popular middlebrow fiction. In the wake of the recent rediscovery of Marsh’s fiction, this essay collection builds on burgeoning scholarly interest in the author. Marsh emerges here as a fascinating writer who helped shape the genres of popular fiction and whose stories offer surprising responses to issues of criminality, gender and empire in this period of cultural transition.