Fiona Macintosh is Emeritus Professor of Classical Reception and Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. She was the Director of the APGRD in Oxford from 2010 to 2024 and has published widely on the reception of ancient epic and tragedy in the modern world.David Ricks is Professor Emeritus, King’s College London, and sometime editor of the journals Dialogos: Hellenic Studies Review and Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. He has written widely on modern Greek poetry and on the classical tradition.

• A: Theory of literatureChapter 1Literary language and critical values: a dialectic of ancient and modernStephen HalliwellChapter 2What’s the meta- with you? Poetic language and metapoeticsSebastian MatznerChapter 3The animal life of poetry: variations on an impouvoirVasiliki DimoulaChapter 4When ethics and poetics were one: Weltanschauung in nineteenth-century classical philologyBoris MaslovB: Greek literature, archaic to classicalChapter 5‘Language charged with meaning’: Sappho on a dreamPatrick FinglassChapter 6The Thermopylai epigrams again: Herodotos 7.228Chris CareyChapter 7Billy-goat song: the acoustic effect and etymology of tragōidiaEdith HallChapter 8Clytemnestra’s handiwork in Aeschylus and PindarOliver TaplinChapter 9Poetics of prose: a case study in HerodotusRichard RutherfordC: The German dimensionChapter 10Myth and ‘metaphysical reach’ in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf TaurisMatthew BellChapter 11Philology and poetry: the literary legacies of Nietzsche and RohdeBernhard ZimmermannD: Classical reflexes beyond Greece and GermanyChapter 12Drawing a transparent veil: sexual euphemism in literatureWilliam FitzgeraldChapter 13Heroism at Troy and Hampton Court: Clarissa’s speech in The Rape of the LockDavid HopkinsE: The Language Question: ‘neo-Latin’ and ‘modern Greek’ casesChapter 14The quality of humanist Latin literature and the trouble with Neo-LatinAndrew LairdChapter 15Glossing the modern Greek poetic canonDavid RicksF: Classicizing in a recalcitrant ageChapter 16Tragedy refigured in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven KillingsJustine McConnellChapter 17Sublimity at Colonus: from Yeats to Mahon, via HeaneyFiona MacintoshBibliography of Michael Silk’s publications