ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the ways in which Classical Reception Studies have developed from their origins in literary criticism, in order to become one of the most flourishing and wide-ranging strands of Classical Studies in the twenty-first century. Historical fiction has always been a central preoccupation of this field of scholarship. An exploration of its rich seams of scholarship—and indeed creative practice—provides a valuable insight into how Classical Reception Studies conceptualise our encounters with the past and our attempts to reconstruct it. The chapter also demonstrates the importance of the intersections between classical literature and ancient material culture, particularly in the example of Pompeii, where the creation of historical fiction has been one of the most powerful ways of attempting to restore and understand an antiquity whose presence in the literary and archaeological records is seductive, yet always incomplete.
