A collection of essays exploring the different ways in which the ruined city of Pompeii has been a major source of inspiration to Western imaginations. Creative and popular, as well as scholarly approaches are covered, including an interview with the novelist Robert Harris, and the volume is fully illustrated, with several images in full colour.

A Companion to the Flavian Age of Imperial Rome provides a systematic and comprehensive examination of the political, economic, social, and cultural nuances of the Flavian Age (69–96 CE). Includes contributions from over two dozen Classical Studies scholars organized into six thematic sections Illustrates how economic, social, and cultural forces interacted to create a variety of social worlds within a composite Roman empire Concludes with a series of appendices that provide detailed chronological and demographic information and an extensive glossary of terms Examines the Flavian Age more broadly and inclusively than ever before incorporating coverage of often neglected groups, such as women and non-Romans within the Empire

In De-Introducing the New Testament, the authors argue for a renewed commitment to the defamiliarizing power of New Testament studies and a reclaiming of the discipline as one that exemplifies the best practices of the humanities. A new approach that asks us to ‘defamiliarize’ what we think we know about the New Testament, articulating themes and questions about its study that encourage further reflection and engagement Looks behind the traditional ways in which the NT is “introduced” to critically engage the conceptual framework of the field as a whole Provides a critical intervention into several methodological impasses in contemporary NT scholarship Offers an appraisal of the relationship between economics and culture in the production of NT scholarship Written in a style that is clear and concise, ideal for student readership

Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius is a forensic examination of two of the most famous letters from the ancient Mediterranean world: Pliny the Younger’s Epistulae 6.16 and 6.20, which offer a contemporary account of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. These letters, sent to the historian Tacitus, provide accounts by Pliny the Younger about what happened when Mt Vesuvius exploded, destroying the surrounding towns and countryside, including Pompeii and Herculaneum, and killing his uncle, Pliny the Elder. This volume provides the first comprehensive full-length treatment of these documents, contextualized by evidence-rich biographies for both Plinys, and a synthesis of the latest archaeological and volcanological research which answers questions about the eruption date. A new collation of sources results in a detailed manuscript tradition and an authoritative Latin text, while commentaries on each letter offer copiously referenced insights on their structure, style, and meaning. Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius offers a thorough companion to these letters, and to the eruption, which will be of interest not only to those working on Vesuvius, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and the works of Pliny but also to general readers, Latin students, and scholars of the Roman world more broadly.

British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime excavates British late modernism's relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. As a wartime between, but distinct from, those of the First World War and the Cold War, Second World wartime involves an anxiety that is both repetition and imaginary: both a dread of past violence unleashed anew, and that of a future violence still ungraspable. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes—time capsules, time zones, and ruins—this volume contends that Second World wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime surpassed the boundaries of a specific state of emergency, becoming first routine and then open-ended. It offers a synoptic, wide-ranging look at writers on the home front, including Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Rose Macaulay, through a variety of genres, such as life-writing, the novel, and the short story. It also considers an array of cultural and archival material from photographers such as Cecil Beaton, filmmakers such as Charles Crichton, and artists such as John Minton. It shows how figures harnessed or exploited their media's temporal properties to formally register the distinctiveness of this wartime through a complex feedback between anticipation and retrospection, oftentimes fashioning the war as a memory, even while it was taking place. While offering a strong foundation for new readers of the mid-century, the book's overall theoretical focus on chronophobia will be an important intervention for those already working in the field.

Rewriting the Ancient World looks at how and why the ancient world, including not only the Greeks and Romans, but also Jews and Christians, has been rewritten in popular fictions of the modern world. The fascination that ancient society holds for later periods in the Western world is as noticeable in popular fiction as it is in other media, for there is a vast body of work either set in, or interacting with, classical models, themes and societies. These works of popular fiction encompass a very wide range of society, and the examination of the interaction between these books and the world of classics provides a fascinating study of both popular culture and example of classical reception.

Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick as Book Artist represents the first book-length study to explore the intersections of Sedgwick's critical writing, poetry, and, most importantly, book art, making the case that her art criticism, especially her meditations on domestic and nineteenth-century photography, and "artist's book" projects are as formally complex and brilliant, conceptually significant and life-changing, as her literary criticism and theory. In addition, the book represents a significant intervention into recent debates about reparative reading, surface reading, and the descriptive turn across the humanities, because of its sustained, positive accounts on Sedgwick's books as visual, textural, and material objects. The book ranges across Sedgwick's published output, from The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980) to the posthumously published The Weather in Proust (2011), and features her meditations on a wide variety of art-historical topoi, including Judith Scott's queer/crip fiber art; the anality of Polykleitos's Doryphorus; queer Modernist typography; Piranesi's punitive space; Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell's queer holy family; Manet's frontality and thalassic aesthetics; fat and thin aesthetics of various stripes; and the queer photography of Anna Atkins, Clementina Hawarden, and Julia Margaret Cameron; Baron De Mayer, Eugene Atget, and P.H. Emerson; as well as David Hockney, Ken Brown, and her own father, a NASA lunar photographer. The book climaxes with two chapter-length explorations of Sedgwick's own late-life book-art practice: her panda Valentine alphabet cards (c. 1996) and her Last Days of Pompeii/Cavafy unique artist's book (c. 2007). Jason Edwards is a Professor of Art History at the University of York, where he works at the intersections of queer and vegan theory, and on British art history in its global contexts in the period from c.1760-1940. He is the author of the Routledge Critical Thinkers volume on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Routledge, 2009) as well as the editor of Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick As a Poet (punctum books, 2017), which includes Sedgwick's uncollected poems. In addition, Jason is also the author of Alfred Gilbert's Aestheticism (Ashgate 2006), and the co-editor of special issues of journals and edited collections on Grinling Gibbons, Joseph Cornell, the British School of Sculpture c.1760-1832, Victorian sculpture in its global contexts, the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic interiors, and homoeroticism, art and aestheticism in Victorian Britain. Jason has also co-curated exhibitions on Turner's whaling imagery, Alfred Gilbert, and Victorian sculpture more broadly, at Tate Britain, the Yale Center for British Art, Hull Maritime Museum, Lotherton Hall, and the Henry Moore Institute for the Study of Sculpture, in Leeds. Jason's forthcoming book Queer Craft deals with Sedgwick's work as a fiber artist.

This dynamic collection of essays by international film scholars and classicists addresses the provocative representation of sexuality in the ancient world on screen. A critical reader on approaches used to examine sexuality in classical settings, contributors use case studies from films and television series spanning from the 1920s to the present.

This book investigates the wide-ranging connections between sculpture, sexuality, and history in Western culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Sculpture has offered a privileged site for the articulation of sexual experience and the formation of sexual knowledge. As historical objects, sculptures also draw attention to the different ways in which knowledge about sexuality is facilitated through an engagement with the past. Bringing together contributors from across disciplines, including art history, classics, film studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, museum studies, queer theory and reception studies, the volume presents original readings of sculptural art in relation to antiquarianism, aesthetics, collecting cultures, censorship and obscenity, psychoanalysis, sexology, and the experience and regulation of museum spaces. It examines how sculptural encounters were imagined and articulated in literature, painting, film and science. As a whole, the book opens up a new understanding of the ways in which sculptures, as real or imagined objects, have fundamentally shaped approaches to and receptions of the past in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Chapters 8 and 10 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Archaeological interpretation is an imaginative act. Stratigraphy and artefacts do not tell us what the past was like; that is the task of the archaeologist. The diverse group of contributors to this volume address the relationship between archaeology and imagination through the medium of historical fiction and fictive techniques, both as consumers and as producers. The fictionalisation of archaeological research is often used to disseminate the results of scholarly or commercial archaeology projects for wider public outreach. Here, instead, the authors focus on the question of what benefits fiction and fictive techniques, as inspiration and method, can bring to the practice of archaeology itself. The contributors, a mix of archaeologists, novelists and other artists, advance a variety of theoretical arguments and examples to advance the case for the value of a reflexive engagement between archaeology and fiction. Themes include the similarities and differences in the motives and methods of archaeologists and novelists, translation, empathy, and the need to humanise the past and diversify archaeological narratives. The authors are sensitive to the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding the influence of fiction on researchers and the incorporation of fictive techniques in their work. Sometimes dismissed as distracting just-so stories, or even as dangerously relativistic narratives, the use of fictive techniques has a long history in archaeological research and examples from the scholarly literature on many varied periods and regions are considered. The volume sets out to bring together examples of these disparate applications and to focus attention on the need for explicit recognition of the problems and possibilities of such approaches, and on the value of further research about them.