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Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War PDF

476 Pages·2010·3.16 MB·English
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Preview Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the c lassical past. Stand in the Trench, Achilles Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War ELIZABETH VANDIVER 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Elizabeth Vandiver 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–954274–1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Manuscript of Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s ‘I saw a man this morning’. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College. This page intentionally left blank To the memory of John William Streets coal-miner, poet, artist, soldier born 24 March 1886 died 1 July 1916 This page intentionally left blank Preface Ninety-one years after the Armistice was signed, public interest in the First World War remains strong and growing. There seems to be an almost insatiable appetite for books on all aspects of the war: its history, its social and cultural consequences, its art, and its literature, especially its poetry. Books about the war poets appear almost every month; the last fi ve years have seen new biographies of major poets, new anthologies of war poetry, and new works of criticism.1 In the face of this torrent of publication, it may seem audacious to assert that there is room for yet another book on First World War poetry, let alone one that involves a hitherto unexplored aspect of that poetry. Yet that is this book’s claim, and the basis for it involves another strand of scholarly enquiry, classical reception studies. In the last few years reception studies have become one of the most exciting and fruitful branches of classics in the English-speaking scholarly world, especially in the United Kingdom.2 This burgeoning fi eld has produced research on classics in nineteenth-century novels, in fi lm, in the British theatrical tradition, and many other areas; but no one has 1 Biographies, e.g. Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography (London: Picador, 2005); Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of A Great War Poet. A New Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008). Anthologies, e.g. Vivien Noakes (ed.), Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry (Stroud: Sutton, 2006); Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (eds.), The Winter of the World: Poems of the First World War, pbk. edn. (London: Constable, 2008). Criticism, e.g. Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). New publications on the war’s history and its social and cultural impact also continue to appear. 2 Recent publications, e.g. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (eds.), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (eds.), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Madden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). Royal Holloway University has recently opened a Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome; description at <http://www.rhul.ac.uk/research/ CRGR/Index.html>.

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Elizabeth Vandiver examines the ways in which British poets of the First World War used classical literature, culture, and history as a source of images, ideas, and even phrases for their own poetry. Vandiver argues that classics was a crucial source for writers from a wide variety of backgrounds, f
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