Bloomsbury Academic Anne Carson: Antiquity (Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception)

From her seminal Eros the Bittersweet (1986) to her experimental Float (2016), Bakkhai (2017) and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), Anne Carson’s engagement with antiquity has been deeply influential to generations of readers, both inside and outside of academia. One reason for her success is the versatile scope of her classically oriented oeuvre, which she rethinks across multiple media and categories. Yet an equally significant reason is her profile as a classicist. In this role, Carson unfailingly refuses to conform to the established conventions and situated practices of her discipline, in favour of a mode of reading classical literature that allows for interpretative and creative freedom. From a variety of interrelated thematic foci and directions, the volume explores the erudite indiscipline of Carson’s classicism as it emerges in her poetry, translations, essays, and visual artistry. It argues that her classicism is irreducible to a single vision, and that it is best approached as integral to the protean character of her artistic thought. From a multi-praxis, cross-disciplinary perspective, the study collects twenty essays by poets, translators, artists, practitioners and scholars. It turns a spotlight on a series of interrelated issues in Carson’s dialogue with antiquity, most prominently, her academic and artistic profile as a classicist, the character of her classical poetics and ethos, the traditions and contexts of her classical thought, her experiments with form, including paratextual materials, her classical translation praxis, and her creative engagement with visual and installation arts. Anne Carson/Antiquity offers the first collective study of the author’s classicism, while drawing attention to one of the most avant-garde, multifaceted readings of the classical past.