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Image, Text, and Culture in Classical Antiquity

About the Book Series

Since the Renaissance - and arguably much earlier - the visual and verbal remains of the Greco-Roman world have been a constant source of inspiration and enlightenment. This series offers an interdisciplinary forum for research into those ancient literary and artistic cultures, exploring classical materials both on their own terms and in light of their subsequent receptions. Attuned to the ways in which different cultural forms mediate different aspects of the classical past, the series explores both the fundamental problems and opportunities of reconstructing Greco-Roman antiquity from its surviving archaeological and textual traces.

A defining interest of the series lies in the intersection between ancient visual and verbal media. In what ways do images and texts construct different records of the classical past, and how did ancient artists and writers themselves theorize the relations between what can be seen and what can be said? Drawing on recent comparative literary and visual cultural studies, series-volumes explore how interdisciplinary approaches can illuminate different aspects of ancient cultural and intellectual history. At the same time, they demonstrate how classical materials can nuance more modern theories of visual and verbal mediation in turn.

The series will publish monographs and edited volumes on all periods of Greco-Roman history, from Archaic Greece through to Late Antiquity. We are particularly interested in projects that are structured according to theme, medial difference or methodological problem rather than chronological timeframe. Above all, volumes aim to probe, interrogate and provoke: by crossing traditional disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries within and beyond the field of classics, while also drawing on approaches developed outside its historicist parameters, Image, Text and Culture in Classical Antiquity engages a broad readership from a range of different academic perspectives. 

3 Series Titles


The Neronian Grotesque

The Neronian Grotesque

1st Edition

By Scott Weiss
March 13, 2025

During the reign of Nero, Roman culture produced some of its most spectacular works of art and literature, and some of its strangest. This study explores these effects across textual and visual media in an integrated way. Weiss' analysis allows for appreciation of the shared strategies of ...

The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens Forms of Thought

The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens: Forms of Thought

1st Edition

Edited By Emily Clifford, Xavier Buxton
December 19, 2024

This book explores the imaginative processes at work in the artefacts of Classical Athens. When ancient Athenians strove to grasp ‘justice’ or ‘war’ or ‘death’, when they dreamt or deliberated, how did they do it? Did they think about what they were doing? Did they imagine an imagining mind? ...

Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature The World’s Forge

Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature: The World’s Forge

1st Edition

By Karel Thein
August 26, 2024

This volume takes a fresh look at ekphrasis as a textual practice closely connected to our embodied imagination and its verbal dimension; it offers the first detailed study of a large family of ancient ecphrastic shields, often studied separately, but never as an ensemble with its own development. ...

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