This month we’re featuring pieces about Classical Reception in New Zealand! First, Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson from the University of Oxford discusses the book, Athens to Aotearoa: Greece and Rome in New Zealand Literature and Society.
Then — in the following post — Professor John Davidson from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand (with Professor Marguerite Johnson) writes about John’s classically-inspired poetry in the collection, Classical Illusions.
Athens to Aotearoa: Greece and Rome in New Zealand Literature and Society
Edited by Diana Burton, Simon Perris and Jeff Tatum, Victoria University Press (2017).
Athens to Aotearoa is an illuminating and provocative collection for any reader interested in the various relationships between classics, art, literature and New Zealand identity.
This edited volume was woven together with great care by Diana Burton, Simon Perris and Jeff Tatum following a conference they hosted at Victoria University, Wellington in September 2014. Athens to Aotearoa presents essays from some of New Zealand’s most important artistic and critical voices reflecting on their engagement with Greece and Rome. It confronts New Zealand’s ongoing, sometimes fraught, and always complicated, relationship with its classical heritage.
The ‘Introduction’ by co-editor, Simon Perris (pp. 7–47), situates the history of Classical Reception Studies in New Zealand, from earliest times to the present. The fourteen chapters are divided into five sections, beginning with ‘Writers and Artists’ (pp. 51–128); ‘Visual Arts’ (pp. 131–69); ‘Myths’ (pp.173–242); ‘Poets’ (pp. 245–309); and ‘History and Society’ (pp. 313–45).
Chapters:
- Witi Ihimaera: ‘What if Cyclops was Alive and Well and Living in a Cave in Invercargill?’
- Karen Healey: ‘Girls Going Underground: Navigating Mythologies in Aotearoa’s Literary Landscape’
- Anna Jackson: ‘‘I, Clodia’: I had a Dream I was a Ghost’
- Marian Maguire: ‘A Fabricated History of Graeco-New Zealand Interaction’
- Greta Hawes: ‘Discussions with Mountains in Marian Maguire’s A Taranaki Dialogue’
- Tom Stevenson: ‘Julius Caesar in Xena: Warrior Princess’
- Simon Perris: ‘Orpheus, Māui and the Underworld in New Zealand Literature’
- Geoff Miles: ‘‘The Darkly Recurrent and Improbable Dream’: James K. Baxter and the Venus/Anchises Story’
- Sharon Matthews: ‘Dionysus, Christ and the Publican: Ambiguous Gods in The Day That Flanagan Died’
- Peter Whiteford: ‘Anna Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook’
- Maxine Lewis: ‘C. K. Stead Writes Catullus: Persona, Intention, Intratext and Allusion’
- John Davidson: ‘Horace, Catullus, Lucretius and Mason’
- Matthew Trundle: ‘The Reception of the Classical Tradition in New Zealand War Reporting and Memory in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries’
- Arlene Holmes-Henderson: ‘Classical Subjects in Schools: A Comparative Study of New Zealand and the United Kingdom’
The book has received multiple positive reviews in The Journal of New Zealand Literature (Riley, 2018), The International Journal of the Classical Tradition (Johnson, 2019) and The Classical Review (Dobbin-Bennett, 2019). Reviewers rightly identify that the book has provided guided provocation for further debate and reflection, not answers:
‘Where this important conversation should move next is towards a more coherent and meaningful investigation of classical influence, infiltration and impact in…New Zealand, combining postcolonial circumspection with pioneering nerve — an investigation that risks conclusions and that dares to capture the imagination of a non-specialist audience’ (Riley 2018).
The real triumph of the conference, and subsequently this volume, was the cooperation of artists, writers, performers, academics, teachers, policymakers and historians who engaged with the texts, themes and ideas from antiquity. Elucidating New Zealand’s distinctive appropriation of the Classics through shared critical appraisal is a methodology which has profoundly enriched my own research on Classics education.
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Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson is Research Fellow in Classics Education at the University of Oxford where she leads the Classics in Communities project. This five year educational research study investigates the impact that learning Latin and Greek has on children’s cognitive development. Her latest book is ‘Forward with Classics: Classical languages in schools and communities’ (Bloomsbury, 2018), co-edited with Mai Musie and Steve Hunt. She has published extensively on Classics education in the UK and worldwide, in various capacities as academic researcher, curriculum designer and expert advisor to national governments. For more information, see www.drarlenehh.com