Ebook: Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 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.
This book explores the diverse ways that ancient Greek myth has been used in fiction internationally since 1989. 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. Yet their engagement with it has been by no means homogeneous, and this volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to classical antiquity to articulate their own contemporary concerns.
While Greek myth and literature were key constituents in nineteenth-century realist and early twentieth-century modernist fiction, they faded in significance mid-century, at a time when V.S. Pritchett warned that the novel as a form would be inadequate to the cultural ‘processing’ of recent atrocities. However, the creative energies released by the end of the Cold War, the rise of the postcolonial novel, and the terrible recent conflicts in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa, which the collapse of the Soviet Union helped to engender, contributed to a remarkable renaissance of significant fiction which engaged once more with the Greeks. By drawing out this dimension, the volume challenges the conventional categorisation of works of fiction according to national tradition, even while the geographical range of the book includes works by Brazilian, French, German, Japanese, Indian, North American, Maori, African, Russian, Greek, Irish, and Arabic writers.