ABSTRACT

This collection of essays from a diverse group of scholars represents a multidisciplinary redeployment of the Aeneid that aims to illuminate its importance to our present moment. It provides a rigorous and multifaceted answer to the question, "Why should we still think about the Aeneid?"

The book contains chapters detailing previously undocumented modern literary receptions of Vergil’s epic, addressing the Aeneid’s relevance to understanding modern political discourse, explaining how the Aeneid assists in making sense of the pressing current issues of trauma and damage to one’s sense of identity, and even looking at how the epic can shape our future. The chapters build upon and extend beyond reception studies to provide the most current and complete answer to the question of the epic’s current relevance.

The primary audiences for this collection are undergraduate students, graduate students, and professional academics from all disciplines. This collection should be of interest to readers whose academic interests include textual and cultural studies, classics, comparative literature, pedagogy, medical humanities, veterans studies, trauma studies, immigration studies, young adult fiction, world literature, communication and political discourse, citizenship studies, and ethnic studies.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

The Aeneid and the modern world

part I|98 pages

The Aeneid and modern literature

chapter 1|20 pages

Empire and exile

Kipling's Vergil

chapter 3|22 pages

Yehuda Amichai's “The Times My Father Died” (1959)

A Jewish Aeneas in flight from the Holocaust 1

chapter 4|18 pages

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit

Contemporary Italian writers remembering the Aeneid

chapter 5|16 pages

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and the Aeneid

Lyra as an anti-Aeneas

part II|66 pages

The Aeneid and modern political discourse and culture

chapter 6|20 pages

The patriotic singer

Christopher Pearse Cranch's American Aeneid

chapter 8|22 pages

Daedalus in DC

Vergil and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial 1

part III|53 pages

The Aeneid and contemporary trauma and identity

chapter 9|19 pages

A matter of time

Traumatic temporality in Vergil's Aeneid

chapter 10|13 pages

Dislocated identities

The Aeneid and the Syrian refugee crisis

chapter 11|19 pages

To know thyself in a world undone

Apocalypse and authenticity in the Aeneid

part IV|36 pages

The Aeneid into the future

chapter 12|14 pages

The Aeneid for the next generation

An empirical study