Maria Wyke - Böcker

Parchments of Gender builds up an important source of inter-disciplinary information for the study of gender and the body in ancient history. The central and unifying theme is the body's relation to gender. With essays covering the ancient communities of Greece, Rome, and Judaea, the volume argues that the body is culturally constructed and not a sign of what is natural. Ancient bodies are "parchments of gender": textual skins on which gender is inscribed and on which can be traced other interconnecting matrices of knowledge and power that give these bodies their seemingly legible contours. The volume also demonstrates the central role of antiquity in the developing cultural formation of the gendered body as a concept, a practice and an experience in modern societies.

Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome is a book for all readers who want to know more about the literature that underpins Western civilization. Chistopher Pelling and Maria Wyke provide a vibrant and distinctive introduction to twelve of the greatest authors from ancient Greece and Rome, writers whose voices still resonate strongly across the centuries: Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal and Tacitus. To what vital ideas do these authors give voice? And why are we so often drawn to what they say even in modern times? Twelve Voices investigates these tantalizing questions, showing how these great figures from classical antiquity still address some of our most fundamental concerns in the world today (of war and courage, dictatorship and democracy, empire, immigration, city life, art, madness, irrationality, and religious commitment), and express some of our most personal sentiments (about family and friendship, desire and separation, grief and happiness). These twelve classical voices can sound both compellingly familiar and startlingly alien to the twenty-first century reader. Yet they remain suggestive and inspiring, despite being rooted in their own times and places, and have profoundly affected the lives of those prepared to listen to them right up to the present day.

The Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905 largely on the basis of his historical novel Quo vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero. The novel's vivid and moving reconstruction of religious persecution and struggle against tyranny catapulted its author into literary stardom. But, before long, Quo vadis began to 'detach' itself from the person of its author and to become a multimedial, mass culture phenomenon. In the West and in the East, it was adapted for stage and screen, provided the inspiration for works of music and other genres of literature, was transformed into comic strips and illustrated children's books, was cited in advertising, and referenced in everyday objects of material culture. This volume explores the strategies Sienkiewicz used to recreate Neronian Rome and the reasons his novel was so avidly consumed and reproduced in new editions, translations, visual illustrations, and adaptations to the stage and screen across Europe and in the United States. The contributions render visible for English-speaking readers the impact of a Polish work of high literature on the presence of Nero, Christian persecution, and ancient Rome in Western popular culture.

Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome is a book for all readers who want to know more about the literature that underpins Western civilization. Chistopher Pelling and Maria Wyke provide a vibrant and distinctive introduction to twelve of the greatest authors from ancient Greece and Rome, writers whose voices still resonate strongly across the centuries: Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal and Tacitus. To what vital ideas do these authors give voice? And why are we so often drawn to what they say even in modern times? Twelve Voices investigates these tantalizing questions, showing how these great figures from classical antiquity still address some of our most fundamental concerns in the world today (of war and courage, dictatorship and democracy, empire, immigration, city life, art, madness, irrationality, and religious commitment), and express some of our most personal sentiments (about family and friendship, desire and separation, grief and happiness). These twelve classical voices can sound both compellingly familiar and startlingly alien to the twenty-first century reader. Yet they remain suggestive and inspiring, despite being rooted in their own times and places, and have profoundly affected the lives of those prepared to listen to them right up to the present day.

Brought vividly to life on screen, the myth of ancient Rome resonates through modern popular culture. Projectingthe Past examines how the cinematic traditions of Hollywood and Italy have resurrected ancient Rome to address the concerns of the present. The book engages contemporary debates about the nature of the classical tradition, definitions of history, and the place of the past in historical film.

Brought vividly to life on screen, the myth of ancient Rome resonates through modern popular culture. Projectingthe Past examines how the cinematic traditions of Hollywood and Italy have resurrected ancient Rome to address the concerns of the present. The book engages contemporary debates about the nature of the classical tradition, definitions of history, and the place of the past in historical film.

The figure of Julius Caesar has loomed large in the United States since its very beginning, admired and evoked as a gateway to knowledge of politics, war, and even national life. In this lively and perceptive book, the first to examine Caesar's place in modern American culture, Maria Wyke investigates how his use has intensified in periods of political crisis, when the occurrence of assassination, war, dictatorship, totalitarianism or empire appears to give him fresh relevance. Her fascinating discussion shows how - from the Latin classroom to the Shakespearean stage, from cinema, television and the comic book to the internet - Caesar is mobilized in the U.S. as a resource for acculturation into the American present, as a prediction of America's future, or as a mode of commercial profit and great entertainment.

Throughout his work, the Roman poet Horace displays many, sometimes conflicting, faces: these include dutiful son, expert lover, gentleman farmer, man about town, outsider, poet laureate, sharp satirist and measured moraliser. This book features a wide array of essays by an international team of scholars from a number of different academic disciplines, each one shedding new light on aspects of Horace's poetry and its later reception in literature, art and scholarship from antiquity to the present day. In particular, the collection seeks to investigate the fortunes of 'Horace' both as a literary personality and as a uniquely varied textual corpus of enormous importance to western culture. The poems shape an author to suit his poetic aims; readers reshape that author to suit their own aesthetic, social and political needs. Studying these various versions of Horace and their interaction illuminates the author, his poetry and his readers.

Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean builds up an important source of interdisciplinary information for the study of gender and the body in history. .

In the first four decades of cinema, hundreds of films were made that drew their inspiration from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Bible. Few of these films have been studied, and even fewer have received the critical attention they deserve. The films in question, ranging from historical and mythological epics to adaptations of ancient drama, burlesques, cartoons and documentaries, suggest a fascination with the ancient world that competes in intensity and breadth with that of Hollywood's classical era. What contribution did antiquity make to the development of early cinema? How did early cinema's representations affect modern understanding of antiquity? Existing prints as well as ephemera scattered in film archives and libraries around the world constitute an enormous field of research. This extensively illustrated edited collection is a first systematic attempt to focus on the instrumental role of silent cinema in twentieth-century conceptions of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.

This open-access book is an interdisciplinary and transnational study of how screen media can shape our perception of Roman women and project present gender inequalities onto them. Maria Wyke and Monika Wozniak explore a range of representations that have given life to Roman women through a multisensory experience of history as image, movement and sound, starting from the 1900s through to the 2020s (from the arrival of cinema to the ascendance of video games). This book asks: what sources do screen media draw on for their Roman women (given the scarcity of suitable ancient material), how are they assembled aesthetically and ideologically using the specific devices of such media (from camerawork to gameplay), and who are they made by and for (especially in terms of gender)?Each chapter investigates the diverse ways these representations interlock with the social position of women at the time in which they were made, and consider to what extent they have responded to the emergence of feminism, the revisionist scholarship on ancient women that emerged in the mid-1970s, and the rise of the #MeToo movement from 2006. The challenge of creating authentic yet compelling portrayals of Roman women is greater than ever, in a media culture marked by anti-feminist rhetoric and a wide gap between our ancient sources (where female agency is tightly constrained) and current expectations for powerful women in popular culture. The volume will therefore provide a stronger platform on which to build the Roman women of the future.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University College London.

This book explores the significance of Julius Caesar to different periods, societies and people from the 50s BC through to the twenty-first century. This interdisciplinary volume explores the significance of Julius Caesar to different periods, societies and people. Ranges over the fields of religious, military, and political history, archaeology, architecture and urban planning, the visual arts, and literary, film, theatre and cultural studies. Examines representations of Caesar in Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and the United States in particular. Objects of analysis range from Caesar’s own commentaries on the Gallic wars, through Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and images of Caesar in Italian fascist popular culture, to contemporary cinema and current debates about American empire. Edited by a leading expert on the reception of ancient Rome. Includes original contributions by international experts on Caesar and his reception.