Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson

by S. Douglas Olson (editor)

This wide-ranging collection, consisting of 50 essays by leading international scholars in a variety of fields, provides an overview of the reception history of a major literary genre from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present day. Section I considers how the 5th- and 4th-century Athenian comic poets defined themselves and their plays, especially in relation to other major literary forms. It then moves on to the Roman world and to the reception of Greek comedy there in art and literature. Section II deals with the European reception of Greek and Roman comedy in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern periods, and with the European stage tradition of comic theater more generally. Section III treats the handling of Greco-Roman comedy in the modern world, with attention not just to literary translations and stage-productions, but to more modern media such as radio and film. The collection will be of interest to students of ancient comedy as well as to all those concerned with how literary and theatrical traditions are passed on from one time and place to another, and adapted to meet local conditions and concerns.

1097 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

S. Douglas Olson is Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, and is closely associated with the Heidelberg Academy Kommentierung der Fragmente der griechischen Komödie Project. He is also the General Editor of the Basel Homer Commentary English Edition. His special interests are in Greek poetry of the 8th to 4th centuries BCE and its reception in the Roman world; “Old” and “Middle” Comedy; critical editions and commentaries on Greek poetic texts; and ancient literary fragments of all sorts. He is the author of twenty books, including major critical editions and commentaries on Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Wasps, Peace and Thesmophoriazusae, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the fragments of the gastronomic parodists Archestratus of Gela and Matron of Pitane, and an eight-volume Loeb edition of Athenaeus of Naucratis’ Learned Banqueters. He has received numerous national and international research awards and honors, including a Junior Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies, two National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowships, a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a Humboldt Research Award and a Humboldt Reseach Grant. In 2015, he served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bari. From 2005–2010, he was the editor of The Classical Journal, in partial recognition of which he received in 2013 an Ovatio, the CAMWS lifetime service award.