Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction Since 1989

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fictionsince 1989 explores the diverse ways that contemporary world fiction has engaged with ancient Greek myth. Whether as a framing device, or a filter, or via resonances and parallels, Greek myth has proven fruitful for many writers of fiction since the end of the Cold War. This volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to classical antiquity to articulate their own contemporary concerns.

Featuring contributions by an international group of scholars from a number of disciplines, the volume offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to contemporary literature from around the world. Analysing a range of significant authors and works, not usually brought together in one place, the book introduces readers to some less-familiar fiction, while demonstrating the central place that classical literature can claim in the global literary curriculum of the third millennium. The modern fiction covered is as varied as the acclaimed North American television series The Wire, contemporary Arab fiction, the Japanese novels of Haruki Murakami and the works of New Zealand’s foremost Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera.

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King’s College London, and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford, UK. She has published more than twenty books on ancient Greek culture and its reception including The Return of Ulysses (2008), Greek Tragedy(2010), Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris (2013) and Introducing the Ancient Greeks (2015).

Justine McConnell is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013), and co-editor of Ancient Slavery and Abolition: from Hobbes to Hollywood (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015).