In the first major study of the genre, Joshua Scodel shows how English poets have used the poetic epitaph to express their views concerning the power and limitations of poetry as a response to human mortality.

Challenges the divide between political and literary history, in an analysis of a major polemical text from mid-ninth century Europe.

This volume makes a powerful argument for epitome (combining textual dismemberment and re-composition) as a broad hermeneutic field encompassing multifarious historical, conceptual and aesthetical concerns. The contributors gather from across the globe to present case studies of the 'summing up' of cultural artefacts, literary and artistic, in epitomic writing, and as a collective they demonstrate the importance of this genre that has been largely overlooked by scholars. The volume is divided into five sections: the first showcases the broad range of fields from which epitomic analysis can be made, from classics to postmodernism to cultural memory studies; the second focuses in on epitome as dismemberment in writing from late antiquity to the modern day; the third considers a 'productive negativity' of epitomic writings and how they are useful tools for investigating the very borders and paradoxes of language; the fourth brings this to bear on materiality; the fifth considers re-composition as a counterpart to dismemberment and problematises it. Across the volume, examples are taken from important late antique writers such as Ausonius, Clement of Alexandria, Macrobius, Nepos, Nonius Marcellus and Symphosius, and from modern authors such as Antonin Artaud, Barthes, Nabokov and Pascal Quignard. Epitomic writings about art from decorated tabulae to sarcophagi are also included, as are epitomic images themselves in the form of manuscript illustrations that sum up their text.

Fragmented, buried, and largely lost, the classical past presents formidable obstacles to anyone who would seek to know it. 'Deep Classics' is the study of these obstacles and, in particular, of the way in which the contemplation of the classical past resembles – and has even provided a model for – other kinds of human endeavor. This volume offers a new way to understand the modalities and aims of Classics itself, through the ages. Its individual chapters draw fruitful connections between the reception of the classical and current concerns in philosophy of mind, cognitive theory, epistemology, media studies, sense studies, aesthetics, queer theory and eco-criticism. What does the study of the ancient past teach us about our encounters with our own more recent but still elusive memories? What do our always partial reconstructions of ancient sites tell us about the limits of our ability to know our own world, or to imagine our future? What does the reader of the lacunose and corrupted literatures of antiquity learn thereby about literature and language themselves? What does a shattered statue reveal about art, matter, sensation, experience, life? Does the way in which these vestiges of the past are encountered – sitting in a library, standing in a gallery, moving through a ruin – condition our responses to them and alter their significance? And finally, how has the contemplation of antiquity helped to shape seemingly unrelated disciplines, including not only other humanistic and scientific epistemologies but also non-scholarly modes and practices? In asking these and similar questions, Deep Classics makes a pointed intervention in the study of the classical tradition, now more widely known as 'reception studies'.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.