Description
Book SynopsisBrill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas illuminates the remarkable range of Greco-Roman classical receptions across the western hemisphere from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. Bringing together fifteen essays by scholars working at the intersection of Classics and all aspects of Americanist studies, this unique collection examines how Hispanophone, Lusophone, Anglophone, Francophone, and/or Indigenous individuals engaged with Greco-Roman literary cultures and materials. By coming at the matter from a multilingual transhemispheric perspective, it disrupts prevailing accounts of classical reception in the Americas which have typically privileged North over South, Anglophone over non-Anglophone, and the cultural production of hegemonic groups over that of more marginalized others. Instead it offers a fresh account of how Greco-Roman literatures and ideas were in play from Canada to the Southern Cone to the Caribbean, treating classical reception in the early Americas as a dynamic, polyvocal phenomenon which is truly transhemispheric in reach.
Trade Review''This new collection assembles fourteen essays focussing on how European classical learning was transmitted, resisted, and transformed in Ibero-American, Caribbean, American and Canadian areas between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries ... The collection is directed at advanced students and scholars working in the relevant cultural areas, and at classicists everywhere. Editor Maya Feile Tomes seeks to illuminate both the centring of an elite culture in New World writing and academic curricula, and the radical decentring it underwent.'' Germaine Warkentin, in BMCR 2022.07.19
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction: Synecdoche in Reverse: America’s Transhemispheric Classics Maya Feile Tomes 1 Utopia Writes Back: José Manuel Peramás on the Limits of Republicanism Michael Brumbaugh 2 Degenerating the Classical Canon in Brazil: Bernardo Guimarães’s Ovidian A Origem do Mênstruo [‘The Origin of Menstruation’] (1875) Connie Bloomfield-Gadêlha 3 Heaven and Hell: Classical Rhetoric and Courtly Wit in Early Modern Brazil – The Case of Gregório de Matos Artur Costrino 4 La Primera Parte del Parnaso Antártico [‘The First Part of the Antarctic Parnassus’]: Print and the Politics of Translation in Early Peruvian Poetry Joanne van der Woude 5 Justaque cupidine lucri ardentes [‘Burning with a Just Desire for Gain’]: A Barbadian Poet Celebrates the Peace of Utrecht John T. Gilmore 6 Lucianic Dialogues in Colonial Santo Domingo: The Historical Miscellany of Luis Joseph Peguero Dan-el Padilla Peralta 7 Nahua Latinists: Classical Learning and Indigenous Legacies in Sixteenth-Century Mexico Andrew Laird 8 Romans in Spain and Britain as Models and Anti-Models for New World Encounters David A. Lupher 9 A New England Underworld: The Necropolitics and Necropoetics of Katabasis in the Anarchiad (1786–87) and Mock Epics of the Early U.S. Republic Adam J. Goldwyn 10 “Familiar Commerce”: The Classical Origins of John Winthrop’s “Modell” of American Affiliation Ivy Schweitzer 11 Phillis Wheatley’s Niobean Poetics Nicole A. Spigner 12 William Apess and the Athens of America Matthew Duquès 13 Beavers as the Bees of New France: The Beaver’s ‘Allegorical Turn’ in Father François Du Creux’s Historia Canadensis William M. Barton and Jean-Nicolas Mailloux 14 The Fall of Troy in Old Huronia: The Letters of Paul Ragueneau on the Destruction of Wendake, 1649–1651 Zachary Yuzwa Index
