Ancient Violence in the Modern Imagination: The Fear and the Fury

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The collected essays in this volume focus on the presentation, representation and interpretation of ancient violence from war to slavery, rape and murder in the modern visual and performing arts, with special attention to videogames and dance as well as the more usual media of film, literature and theatre. Violence, fury and the dread that they provoke are factors that appear frequently in the ancient sources. The dark side of antiquity, so distant from the ideal of purity and harmony that the classical heritage until recently usually called forth, has repeatedly struck the imagination of artists, writers and scholars across ages and cultures. A global assembly of contributors, from Europe to Brazil and from the US to New Zealand, consider historical and mythical violence in Stanley Kubricks Spartacus and the 2010 TV series of the same name, in Ridley Scotts Gladiator, in the work of Lars von Trier, and in Soviet ballet and the choreography of Martha Graham and Anita Berber. Representations of Roman warfare appear in videogames such as Ryse: Son of Rome and Total War, as well as recent comics, and examples from both these media are analysed in the volume. Finally, interviews with two artists offer insight into the ways in which practitioners understand and engage with the complex reception of these themes.

Reviews

A challenge to all readers to review their own assumptions. * Greece and Rome *
The volume deals with complex and current issues in an innovative way. Among its merits we ascribe the strongly interdisciplinary slant, the variety of fields of investigation and case studies, ... the rigorous methods that characterize the volume, like the rest of the series, and add a fundamental piece to the ever-expanding mosaic of studies on the subject. * Lexis (Bloomsbury Translation) *
This books topic is an urgent one: how contemporary art links violence to antiquity as a way of legitimizing the portrayal and sometimes celebration of physical force. -- Thomas E. Jenkins, Professor of Classical Studies, Trinity University, USA

Author Bio

Irene Berti is a Teaching Fellow at the Pdagogische Hochschule, Heidelberg, Germany. Maria G. Castello is Associate Professor in the Dipartimento di Studi Storici at the Universit degli Studi di Torino, Italy. Carla Scilabra is an independent scholar, Italy.