Chapter 7 builds on, while in some ways reversing, the analysis in Chapter 6. It examines the thirty-nine surviving letters from Keats to Fanny Brawne from the perspective of their distancing function. Keats’s often distinctly fraught and sometimes emotionally coercive letters and notes to Fanny mostly date from the summer and early autumn of 1819, when he was away from London on a writing retreat, and from February to March 1820, when he was living right next door to the Brawne family at Wentworth Place in Hampstead but was often too unwell to see her. The chapter considers Keats’s love letters as informed and even instructed by the writers he happens to be reading (especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Philip Massinger), arguing that what he is reading can itself distance the writer from his recipient as much as bring the two together: Keats’s epistolary intertextuality itself distances him from the object of his desire.

El recurso del método (Reasons of State), published in 1974 by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, has often been analyzed along with other dictatorship novels focusing on recurring themes, such as violence, rebellion, US imperialism or the dictator’s solitude. This essay introduces a “sensory approach” arguing that Carpentier revisits the traditional hierarchy of the five senses. Thematically, the novel emphasizes the “spectacular” and panoptical dimension of the dictator’s regime; however, this visual (and aural) domination is questioned by the Marxist opposition embodied in the character of the Student. From an intertextual perspective, Carpentier’s use of quotations from Descartes paradoxically undermines the Cartesian cogito, and the protagonist’s behavior ultimately evolves toward an anti-Cartesian and anti-ocularcentric stance, as epitomized by the figure of Mayorala Elmira. Reflecting on these two dimensions of the novel from a sensorial point of view contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Carpentier’s poetics.

Alejo Carpentier combines history and literature to compose his novel El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow). On the one hand, he uses historical facts to create a fictional story that reveals a human Christopher Columbus, far removed from stereotypes, myths and ideological designs. On the other hand, he draws on a vast wealth of literary works and authors from the Hispanic world to complement, through intertextualities and cultured references, the image he wishes to present of the Admiral. Relevant examples include quotations from Cervantes’ interlude Retablo de las maravillas (The Stage of Wonders) and Federico García Lorca’s poem “La casada infiel” (“The Unfaithful Wife”), as well as other more general texts such as Juan de Mandavila’s Libro de las maravillas del mundo (Book of the Wonders of the World) and various passages from the Bible. All of this is made possible, despite the anachronisms that appear in the text, thanks to the integration of the novel into the realm of freedoms of the postmodern historical novel.

Pindar’s epinician odes feature narrations of mythical events and references to the realm of myth. There has been a long-standing controversy about how to understand the function of myth within, and its relevance to, these songs, with regard to both their semantic coherence and their relation to festal contexts. Starting from general observations and a brief survey of the main narrations, this chapter explores how Pindar’s use of myth can be conceived as contributing to the praise of the victor, the primary aim of the epinician genre. This investigation focuses on direct comparisons between victors and mythical figures, the victor’s genealogy and place of origin, aetiological references to the past, depictions of the mindset of heroes, metaphorical parallelisms between past and present with regard to both the victory and the odes’ performance, and the intertextual dimension. These uses of myth operate less by directly equating agonistic present and mythical past and more by implying a parallel through indirect means, in either case with the aim of situating, and thereby giving meaning to, the agonistic victory within, and often as the pinnacle of, the history of human civilization.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s most famous work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, to provide an expansive context in which to understand its significance in intellectual, literary and art history. It begins by locating it: explaining the concept behind Pater’s collection of eleven essays in terms of publication history and the periodical press, and exploring the ways in which these essays combine silent citation with originality. Its sections concentrate on: (1) how and why Pater redefines the ‘renaissance’ from the ways in which it was conceived in the nineteenth century; (2) Pater’s definition of subjective aesthetic criticism, which reverses Matthew Arnold’s critical position, with particular attention to the Preface and Conclusion; (3) the centrality of desire and passion in text; (4) Pater’s subject-positioning between the ‘Old Masters’, modernity and his reader.

Pablo Neruda had complex relations to his multiple precursors. They belonged to various periods, from Dante’s Middle Ages to the present time, with Gabriela Mistral. They also belonged to varied cultural and linguistic spheres: early modern Spanish poets loomed large (Ercilla, Quevedo), but so did a number of French poets, especially Arthur Rimbaud, or the American Walt Whitman. This chapter aims to map out these spheres of influence and understand the various ways in which Neruda engaged with his precursors. He “negotiated his debts” (a phrase he used for Whitman) in commentaries, homages, and quotes, but also in complex intertextual operations. While he easily discussed the poets he admired, he also emulated them so as to find his place in certain traditions (especially in his love poetry) or used them for political purposes.

By opening the ‘black box’ of what is said and done in the trial hearings of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the chapter shows that the syllogistic reasoning found in the ICC’s case law and judicial decisions is not a straightforward application of ‘rules’ to ‘facts’, but a contingent discursive achievement that reflects a particular socio-political environment. The discussion of court transcripts from the cases of a Ugandan rebel commander and a Malian jihadist combines a long tradition of sociolinguistic and linguistic-anthropological work on text trajectories and the ‘instability’ of travelling texts with Koskenniemi’s anti-foundationalist re-specification of legal discourse as a ‘language game’. The chapter shows that, first, the recontextualisation of the everyday lives of perpetrators and victims of international crimes with the abstract legal framework of the Rome Statute relies heavily on commonsense understandings of the relevant legal concepts, and, second, that such judicial ‘fact-finding’ and its attendant discursive transformations in turn inscribe international criminal proceedings in a range of broader (geo)political contexts.

This chapter explores Chrétien’s foundational role in the creation and dissemination of Arthurian literature. It begins with a description of the sociohistorical context in which he wrote and a review of the diverse sources on which he drew. He chose as the protagonists of his romances five of Arthur’s knights and created a gallery of attractive and enterprising women to complement their adventures. An examination of the emotions of these female characters, which are tempered by political concerns, informs this essay. The main focus is on Chrétien’s originality – the skill and sophistication of his poetic art, including a masterly use of intertextuality and interlacing. Chrétien delighted in keeping his audience at a distance, inviting critical reflection. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the myriad translations and adaptations his romances inspired in Francophone and other language areas, extending his influence across a wide geographical area and across the ages.

This chapter selectively draws on medieval and post-medieval Arthurian material to consider how, across time, children figure as the subjects of, and the audience for, Arthurian literature. Viewed in the context of medieval education, French romances use accounts of childhood and of enfances (knights’ youthful exploits) to explore ethical and narrative concerns, while some of their central tropes resurface in the Morte Darthur, which is relatively more diffident about childhood and youth per se, to illuminate important aspects of Malory’s art. The chapter outlines some of the culturally influential Anglophone Morte-inspired Arthuriads written for children from the nineteenth century onwards and Arthurian treatments in other child-focused texts, including fantasy writing, novels set in the fifteenth century and in Roman Britain, and Grail-inspired young adult fiction. Arthurian children’s literature, constituted by extraordinary conversations between writers across time and genre, cumulatively exemplifies the nature and creative power of Arthurian intertextuality.

This chapter discusses a multiplicity of Arthurs, all mirroring the complexity of contemporary Africa and the Middle East. Arthur is a familiar presence here in advertisements, video games, children’s books and popular films, but he is rarely found elsewhere. Interestingly, both Chaka and Saladin are sometimes positioned as local counters to Arthur, but later Arthurian references are more likely to be comic or satirical, except for allusions to the Grail legend. References to the latter are characteristic of Nashid Uruk, for instance, and it has been argued that Doris Lessing’s work also reveals a sustained pattern of Grail imagery. Other representations of Arthur are almost entirely negative, linking him to autocratic rule, class elitism, gender imbalance and armed violence; however, awareness of Sir Moriaen, the Moorish knight, seems to be resurging and this may at last allow the tales to move out of the oppressive shadow cast by European imperialism.

Against received opinion, this chapter argues that Ennius does not primarily figure as a stalwart of ancient Roman values within Varro’s Menippean Satires: the Ennius of these understudied late-republican texts is rather a boldly experimental and multiform poet, a model for Varro’s own modernist project. Particular attention is paid to Varro’s Bimarcus, in which a “new” fragment of Ennius’ Saturae is tentatively discovered.

This chapter offers an analysis of the reception of Ennian tragedy in republican Latin poetry, focussing on Pacuvius, Accius, Lucretius, and Catullus. The main methodology employed is that of intertextual analysis. The main thesis advanced is that, while Ennian tragedy seems to have retained its generic distinction and importance in subsequent tragic poetry of the second century bce, by the late Republic, Ennius seems to be more important because of what he has come to represent as a poetic figure and as a repository of poetic material than as a tragedian or epicist.

The suite of chapters comprising Part II homes in on monumental building inscriptions as central means through which individual buildings shaped perceptions of their own architectural histories and of temporal change more broadly. The first of these, Chapter 4, investigates assemblages of epigraphic records of architectural interventions that accumulated on buildings over their long ancient lives. The chapter’s analysis of these encrusted epigraphic environments charts a range of strategies that benefactors adopted in setting up their own commemorative texts vis à vis those of earlier patrons and considers the effects of those decisions on the inscriptions’ reception by contemporary audiences.

In his prologue Herodotus establishes a complex relationship with his poetic predecessors and contemporaries. He presents his narrative of the Greco-Persian Wars as simultaneously indebted and opposed to a network of poets, whose Panhellenic cultural prestige he challenges in the innovative medium of prose. Homeric epic is tacitly acknowledged as a model of primary importance: Herodotus adopts the martial subject matter of the Iliad and projects the persona of the peripatetic hero Odysseus. In perpetuating the kleos of fully human warriors rather than their heroic forebears, Herodotus implies that his own medium of prose historiē, committed to writing, will surpass poetry’s ability to perform its traditional function of public commemoration. Herodotus constructs the entire prologue as an ingenious prose priamel, a poetic rhetorical structure that enables him to emphasize important points of contact with and departure from Homeric epic, Sappho’s fragment 16, and the portrayal of Croesus in epinician poetry.

A shortage of comparative evidence in both early Greek literature and Ionic inscriptions compromises our ability to assess with any precision the degree of Homeric influence on Herodotean language at the level of the individual word and phrase. Nonetheless it is possible to identify with confidence several passages in the Histories that recall and recast the language of specific passages from the Homeric epics (especially the Iliad), as well as episodes that evoke the Homeric representation of xenia (especially in the Odyssey). While these Homeric allusions may serve in a general way to enhance the status and solemnity of the events they describe, we have also observed a variety of more specific (and not always flattering) ways in which the Homeric world, so evoked, casts light on the events and characters portrayed by Herodotus, and even on developments in the Greek world since the defeat of Xerxes’ expedition.