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.

Tusculans 1 offers a multi-faceted refutation of the proposition ‘death is an evil’, accomplished in part through a detailed doxography of a wide range of philosophers of different schools. This survey is far from a jumble of contradictory views, however: Cicero avoids dogmatic insistence on the arguments of any single school and has instead crafted a minimally sectarian protreptic designed to convince readers of any philosophical persuasion that death is not an evil, an approach whose origin he traces back to Socrates’ reflections on death in Plato’s Apology. Furthermore, I argue that this approach amounts to a direct challenge to Cicero’s philosophical rivals, a group of Epicurean authors writing in Latin – including, I speculate, Lucretius – whom Cicero had criticiaed in several prefaces for their narrow-minded dogmatism. In Book 1 Cicero therefore tackles a topic of perennial interest, illustrates how philosophy can and should be written, and attempts to marginalise his Epicurean opponents.

Considers how chaos in the Metamorphoses is a non-linear state and force that disturbs the structural hierarchies that we tend to associate with the formed world. Beginning with a rereading of the cosmogony from book 1 of the Metamorphoses, we observe Ovid combining a range of different philosophical systems including materialist physics and creationist cosmogony. Ovid introduces a Platonic demiurge, whose role it is to place order onto this chaotic system; however, his introduction is a false dawn, as chaos, far from being banished to a primordial past, continually intervenes in the created world, disturbing any sense of a fixed or stable reality. This is matched by the intertextual chaos encountered by the reader, who is left to restitch the cosmos from disparate elements, including conflicting philosophical systems and mythological narratives. The Timaeus provides an important counterweight to Ovid’s cosmogony; on the one hand, the recourse to a more perfect and eternal realm beyond the experience of the physical senses is ripe for deconstruction by Ovid. When read alongside the opening of the Metamorphoses, Plato’s creationist cosmogony appears less fixed and more playful than has been traditionally considered.

Russian realism was begotten by French realism. From the 1830s through the 1880s, Russian prose writers responded to story lines, characters, motifs, and stylistics they found in French, in French journals. Pushkin, in both his poetry and prose, and Gogol in his stories, used Western European models; Lermontov in A Hero of Our Time incorporated, among many others, Georges Sand and Alfred de Vigny; Dostoevsky elaborated the work of Balzac, Eugene Sue, and Jules Janin in Crime and Punishment; and Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in dialogue with the French novel of adultery, particularly Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Russian writers, whose prose tradition was only beginning, saw themselves through Western European eyes, at once admiring French culture and feeling inferior to it. The Russians pitted these works of French (and European) realism against countertexts that refuted what they understood to be Western European values, using French subtexts dialectically to create a new cultural synthesis. The subtextual dialogue parodied, corrected, and rejected European models in order to construct a Russian moral and spiritual truth, often incorporating biblical subtexts to do so.

This chapter outlines essential knowledge for pre-service and in-service teachers regarding the all-encompassing component of language and literacy development: critical literacy. In the current information-saturated world of ‘fake news’ and algorithms that decide the social media content we view, it is important to empower students with the ability to critically engage and knowingly accept or resist what they are reading or viewing. Critical literacy requires text users to approach their consumption of texts with a questioning mindset. It helps them develop an understanding of how texts work – the ability to analyse and identify the visual, linguistic and multimodal features of texts that create meaning implicitly and explicitly. Drawing upon foundational theories and critical literacy models, this chapter demonstrates how to integrate the five macro-skills of reading, writing, listening, speaking and viewing of both textual and multimodal sources to develop students’ critical comprehension and production of various text types.

What is the rationale for bringing together archaic and classical lyric and imperial Greek literature, in the form of epideictic oratory? This chapter explains how such different genres and media (poetry/prose) were in fact akin as both genres ‘of presence’ centred on performance, embedded in well-defined occasions, and negotiating similar discourses of praise and blame. It then sets out the book’s aims and methodology by contextualising them within the ever-growing scholarship on imperial Greek culture. It clarifies what is meant by ‘lyric’ throughout the analysis, and how this use of the term marks a substantial departure from the few previous studies on imperial lyric reception. A similar departure concerns the approach to quotations, intertextuality and pragmatics of reading, which crucially distances this analysis from scholarship focused on Quellenforschung issues. The chapter ends by introducing Aristides’ distinctive engagement with lyric and its impact on our understanding of his works and figure.