Professor of Latin Literature, University of Oxford
Senior Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College
E-mail : stephen.harrison@ccc.ox.ac.uk
Bio: Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College there, where he has been since 1987. His interests are in Latin literature and its later reception, especially Augustan poetry (Horace and Virgil), the Roman novel (especially Apuleius), and neo-Latin poetry (especially the Scottish poet George Buchanan). Though based in Oxford for more than four decades (previously at Balliol, Magdalen and St John’s Colleges), he has also been a visiting lecturer on six continents, made regular visits to North America and Italy, and worked for some years on collaborative Latin commentary projects in the Netherlands and Germany. He is a regular visiting professor at the Universities of Copenhagen, Trondheim and Stellenbosch and has been a visiting professor/fellow at Princeton IAS, Stanford, Bergen, La Sapienza (Rome), Tel Aviv and the Universities of Canterbury and Otago in New Zealand (and now in Jerusalem, where he is honoured to be Mandel Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University).
Publications:
Personal website (including postprint copies of publications) : http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sjh
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/bloomsbury-neo-latin-series/
Classical Scholarship and Its History
From the Renaissance to the Present. Essays in Honour of Christopher Stray
[Trends in Classics – Scholarship in the Making, 1]
Edited by: Stephen Harrison and Christopher Pelling
De Gruyter | 2021
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110719215/html
Course Information:
קורס 28851: אופני התקבלות של הספרות הרומית הקלאסית במערב
This class aims to explore the reception of some major texts of Latin poetry and fiction in later European literatures and intellectual cultures from the medieval period until now, predominantly in English. Particular attention will be paid to issues of cultural tension and later transformation of classical material in different historical and intellectual environments. It should be of interest to students of English and comparative literature as well as classicists.
Course/Module Content:
1: Theories of reception studies – what is classical reception and why is it important?
2: Mapping out ancient epic from Homer to Virgil – a key reception tradition
3. Later Latin epic and the Christian reaction to Virgil – from Ovid to Petrarch’s Africa
4: The history of Virgil’s Queen Dido in European literature – a reception case-study
5: Victorian epic in English: the issue of competing with Homer (Arnold, Clough, Tennyson).
6: Victorian Virgil: the Aeneid from ‘secondary epic’ to the poem of empire
7: Epic and novel: interrelation and reception of the two genres from antiquity to the 1990s
8: Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche in Victorian England – reception of a fairy tale
9: Homer in the 20th and 21st centuries: First World War, Longley, Walcott, Oswald
10: Some versions of pastoral - Vergil’s Eclogues in 20C poetry in English from Frost to Heaney
11: Ovid - the Metamorphoses in the 20C
12: Ovid – the modern rediscovery of the exile poetry