Anne Carson - (Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception) by Laura Jansen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From her seminal Eros the Bittersweet (1986) to her experimental Float (2016), Bakkhai (2017) and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), Anne Carson's engagement with antiquity has been deeply influential to generations of readers, both inside and outside of academia. One reason for her success is the versatile scope of her classically-oriented oeuvre, which she rethinks across multiple media and categories. Yet an equally significant reason is her profile as a classicist. In this role, Carson unfailingly refuses to conform to the established conventions and situated practices of her discipline, in favour of a mode of reading classical literature that allows for interpretative and creative freedom.

From a multi-praxis, cross-disciplinary perspective, the volume explores the erudite indiscipline of Carson's classicism as it emerges in her poetry, translations, essays, and visual artistry. It argues that her classicism is irreducible to a single vision, and that it is best approached as integral to the protean character of her artistic thought. Anne Carson/Antiquity collects twenty essays by poets, translators, artists, practitioners and scholars. Itoffers the first collective study of the author's classicism, while drawing attention to one of the most avant-garde, multifaceted readings of the classical past.

Review Quotes

For all the nuance and involved detail that abounds, this book is a curiously meditative and even personal read, perhaps due to a prose style that is sometimes playful, sometimes contemplative, but seems as invested in the games of identity, authorship, and allusion as Carson herself.
Greece and Rome

This collection proposes and models new and innovative directions for classical reception studies, translation studies, philology, rhetorical studies, even while it opens up Carson's creative oeuvre to a larger audience (poets, visual artists, performance art, etc.).

About the Author

Laura Jansen is Senior Lecturer in Classics & Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, UK. She is author of Borges' Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman World (2018), editor of The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers (2014), and general editor of the monograph series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing (Bloomsbury). Her next books are on Italo Calvino: Classics between Science and Literature and Susan Sontag: From Plato's Cave to Sarajevo.