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CRGR - Books

We have so far published three books, on Homer's Odyssey, Classics and India, and Ancient Slavery, and several more are under contract, to appear in 2011, 2012, and 2013.

Richard Alston, Edith Hall, and Laura Proffitt (eds.)

Reading Ancient Slavery.

(Duckworth January 2010)

book cover: Reading Ancient Slavery

One of two books arising out of our 2007 conference on slavery. Evidence relating to the 'real world' of antiquity - inscriptions, historiography, and legal speeches - has dominated studies of ancient Greek and Roman slavery, although providing few direct accounts by slaves of their subjective experiences. Yet the imaginative fictions produced by the ancient psyche in its literature and art provide many representations and discussions of what it felt like to be a slave. This volume arises out of a conference held in 2007 at the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway and the British Museum in order to celebrate the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Colonies; it provides a sustained discussion of the theory and practice of handling ancient poetry and images in order to enhance our understanding of the way that slavery was experienced by both slaves and their owners in the ancient world. Twelve essays by an international team of specialists develop a variety of theoretical positions, reading practices and interpretive strategies for recovering the psychological and emotional as well as social impact of ancient slavery from Homer, Aristotle, Greek drama, visual images, Roman Poetry and Imperial Roman dream interpretation.

See the Contents Page.

Edith Hall and Phiroze Vasunia (eds.)

India, Greece and Rome 1757-2007.

(BICS supplement 108, London 2010)

book cover: India, Greece and Rome

This is a supplement to Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, edited by Edith Hall and Phiroze Vasunia. It arose out of a conference held in London in 2007 to mark the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence and the 150th anniversary of the 'Mutiny'. The volume brings together people who work on colonial India, the growing field of reception studies in Classics, and other scholars. The papers throw light on the triangular relationship between Classics, Britain, and India, from a variety of different perspectives. Britons ruled India for about two hundred years, and the colonial encounter had a significant impact on the study of Indian culture and history; but the encounter also affected the study of the European past and brought it into a charged relationship with ancient India. The ancient past and the colonial present interacted with each other, in Britain and India, and informed people's responses to political power and cultural developments. We explore an array of connected topics, including the 'Mutiny', neoclassical architecture in Britain, the understanding of the Roman Empire in relation to the British Empire, Homer in Bengali circles, T. Rice Holmes and his writings on India and Rome, Rudyard Kipling and Rosemary Sutcliff, and Greek drama. While most of the chapters focus on the period of British colonial rule, the final two essays extend the ambit of the collection by evaluating theatrical responses to hybridity and political resistance in postcolonial India and Britain. The book also includes a wide-ranging introduction by Phiroze Vasunia which situates the essays in broader intellectual, cultural, and historical contexts.

See the Contents Page.

Edith Hall:

The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey.

(I.B. Tauris / Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

Cover of 'The Return of Ulysses'

An attempt to explain the extraordinary cultural stamina and global penetration of the Odyssey, in fifteen chapters covering translation, theatre, opera, cinema, fiction, colonisation, exploration, sex, race, class, violence, revenge and death.

'Is there anything in the Western literary canon with more abundant, potent or frolicsome offspring than Homer's ODYSSEY? Clearly not, to judge by THE RETURN OF ULYSSES, Edith Hall's enlightening and entertaining cultural history… Hall… fills her pages with sharp and often surprising observations about the ODYSSEY and its spiritual children… Reading her good-humored and accessible book is like conversing across the ages' [Steve Coates]

Reviews in:

Interviews available online:

Hear Edith Hall's interview with Lewis Lapham on Bloomberg Radio.
Hear an interview about the book with WICH Public Radio.

See the jacket information of the book.

Richard Alston, Edith Hall and Justine McConnell (eds.)

Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood

(forthcoming, OUP 2011)

Cover of 'The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1844'

This volume, contracted to OUP, is one of two resulting from our inaugural conference in 2007, which marked the biennium of the abolition of the slave trade in the British colonies. The book provides, for the first time, an in-depth discussion of the cultural memory of ancient Greek and Roman slavery in the struggle to abolish slavery from the late 17th century onwards. Thirteen essays by an international team of historians and literature specialists address the presence of ancient Greeks and Romans in the arguments framed by both opponents and defenders of slavery in Britain, North America and South Africa, and, after emancipation in North America (1865), the lingering presence of classical antiquity in representations of Atlantic slavery in 20th-century writing and cinema. The sources include ancient and modern philosophy, poetry, political speeches, polemical literature, classical scholarship, the visual arts, fiction and theatre; the voices brought back to life belong to former slaves as well as slave-owners and ardent emancipationists

See the Contents Page.