Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene

Front Cover
Todd Breyfogle
University of Chicago Press, 1999 - Education - 405 pages
Perhaps best known for his widely acclaimed translations of the Greek tragedies and Herodotus's History, as well as his edition of Hobbes's Thucydides, David Grene has also had a major impact as a teacher and interpreter of texts both ancient and modern. In this book, distinguished colleagues and former students explore the imaginative force of literature and history in articulating and illuminating the human condition.

Ranging as widely as Grene's own interests in Greek and Roman antiquity, in drama, poetry, and the novel, in the art of translation, and in English history, these essays include discussions of the Odyssey and Ulysses, the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, Mallarmé's English and T. S. Eliot's religion, and the mutually antipathetic minds of Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. The introduction by Todd Breyfogle sketches for the first time the contours of Grene's own thought.

Classicists, political theorists, intellectual historians, philosophers, and students of literature will all find much of value in the individual essays here and in the juxtaposition of their themes.

Contributors: Saul Bellow, Seth Benardete, Todd Breyfogle, Amirthanayagam P. David, Wendy Doniger, Mary Douglas, Joseph N. Frank, Victor Gourevitch, Nicholas Grene, W. R. Johnson, Brendan Kennelly, Edwin McClellan, Françoise Meltzer, Stephanie Nelson, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Ostwald, Robert B. Pippin, James Redfield, Sandra F. Siegel, Norma Thompson, and David Tracy

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Contents

Atheism and the Religiosity of Euripides
33
Poetry and Philosophy in Aristophanes Clouds
50
Calypsos Choice Immortality and Heroic Striving in the Odyssey and Ulysses
63
The Homecomings of Odysseus and Nala
90
A Bird a Mouse a Frog and Some Fish A New Reading of Leviticus II
110
Confabulating Cephalus SelfNarration in Ovids Metamorphoses 7672865
127
Memory and Imagination in Augustines Confessions
139
Metamorphosis and Conversion Apuleiuss Metamorphoses
155
Synge Reality and the Imagination of Place
243
Mallarmé and English
256
T S Eliot as Religious Thinker Four Quartets
269
Rousseau on Providence
285
Dostoyevskys Trojan Horse A Raw Youth
312
Henry James and Modern Moral Life
334
Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson Mutually Antipathetic Minds
360
Postlude
373

Against Entertainment Plato and the Poets Revisited
177
Interlude
201
An Essay by Soseki
203
Part Two
207
I Know Thee Not Old Man The Renunciation of Falstaff
209
Transforming Conventions The Trope of Decorum and Thomas Sheridans Captain OBlunder
228
Problems in American Literature
375
Works by David Grene
389
Contributors
393
Index
397
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