Amanda Wrigley

This important collection of essays both contributes to the expanding field of classical reception studies and seeks to extend it. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it looks at a range of different genres (epic, novel, lyric, tragedy, political pamphlet). Within the published texts considered, the usual range of genres dealt with elsewhere is extended by chapters on books for children, and those in which childhood and memories of childhood are informed by antiquity; and also by a multi-genre case study of a highly unusual subject, Spartacus. "Remaking the Classics" also goes beyond books to dramatic performance, and beyond the theatre to radio - a medium of enormous power and influence from the 1920s to the 1960s, whose role in the reception of classics is largely unexplored. The variety of genres and of media considered in the book is balanced both by the focus on Britain in a specific time period, and by an overlap of subject-matter between chapters: the three chapters on twentieth-century drama, for example, range from performance strategies to post-colonial contexts. The book thus combines the consolidation of a field with an attempt to push it in new and exciting directions.

Greece on Air offers the first substantial discussion of the fascinating history of creative and public engagements with ancient Greek literature, history, and thought via the BBC Radio, from the birth of domestic broadcasting in the 1920s up to the 1960s. The astonishing range of programmes broadcast in this period includes some of the most interesting, creative, and political engagements with ideas from and about ancient Greece in twentieth-century Britain. From talks to schools and adult education groups, creative re-imaginings of ancient historical texts written and broadcast as Second World War propaganda, and scores of performances of Greek tragedy, comedy, and their modern adaptations, Wrigley draws on the vast amount of evidence that exists in the written archives (both for production processes and also listeners' responses) to develop a full understanding of the role of the radio medium in public engagements with ancient Greece in twentieth-century Britain.

This volume presents eleven radio scripts written and produced by the poet and writer Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) over the span of his twenty-year career at the BBC, during which he wrote and produced well over a hundred radio scripts on an impressively wide variety of subjects. This volume's selection of scripts, all but one of which is published for the first time, illustrates the various ways that MacNeice re-worked one particular and recurrent source of material for radio broadcast - ancient Greek and Roman history and literature. The volume thus seeks to explore MacNeice's literary relationship with classical antiquity, including engagements with authors such as Homer, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Petronius, Apuleius, and Horace, in a variety of types of programmes from wartime propaganda work, which used ancient Greek history to comment on the international situation, to lighter entertainment programmes drawing on the Roman novel. MacNeice's educational background in classics, combined with his skill as a writer and his ability in exploring radio's potential for creative work, resulted in programmes which brought the ancient world imaginatively alive for a massive, popular audience at home and abroad. Each script is prefaced by an individual introduction, written by the editors and guest contributor Gonda Van Steen, detailing the political and broadcasting contexts, the relationship of the script with classical antiquity, notes on cast and credits, and the reception of each script's radio performance amongst contemporary listeners. The volume opens with a general introduction which seeks to contextualise the scripts in MacNeice's wider life and work for radio, and it includes an appendix of extant MacNeicean scripts and recordings.