This chapter argues for and interprets allusions to the invocation before the Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.484-93) in Ibycus’ ’Polycrates Ode’, Pindar’s Paean 6 and Paean 7b, and Simonides’ ’Plataea Elegy’. It then considers these four poems together as a unique case study for the early reception of Homer. For no other passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey can we trace an equally extensive afterlife in early Greek lyric. The author argues that the unusual prominence of the narrator’s personality and the exceptionally emphatic claim to objective truth in Il. 2.484–93 made these lines a privileged point of reference for subsequent explorations of the nature of poetic authority.

The book of Isaiah reflects many of the population movements that took place in the period of its formation. Much biblical scholarship focuses on “the (Babylonian) Exile,” but as C. L. Crouch points out in “Isaiah and Migration,” mass population movements were carried out in the sphere of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians long before the Babylonians overthrew Jerusalem. She also calls attention to the migrations experienced by other nations, and to forces of displacement other than deportation, such as warfare, famine, and natural disasters. She analyzes the literary reception of these numerous involuntary migrations, and the ways in which the prophet and his audiences made sense of them.

Brennan Breed’s “The Reception History of Isaiah: Unsealing the Book” takes a single theme attested in just a few verses (Isa 8:16; 29:11; and 30:8) and shows how it has been reinterpreted by readers ceaselessly across the centuries, all the way from later biblical authors to modern times, in response to everything from sectarian divisions to African-American slavery to the trauma of the Holocaust. These verses refer to the words of the prophet being sealed, especially to those who are ignorant, until the time comes for their meaning to be revealed. This theme brings into focus the ways in which Isaiah has been used polemically, and it also points to the text’s power as a seemingly inexhaustible well of meaning.

Schubert was fond of writing four-hand music to be played by two pianists sitting on the same piano bench. His thirty-four compositions in this medium range from the earliest extant composition in his hand (a Fantasy penned in 1810) to his Rondo in A Major finished in the summer of 1828. No composer ever approached the piano duet with the seriousness Schubert did, and his corpus of four-hand pieces stands as the apex of the genre. The four-hand configuration seemed ideally suited to his temperament, as it was a congenial form of music-making that was emblematic in Biedermeier culture as an activity of friendship and sociability. It is thus not surprising that these works were a staple in his Schubertiads and ranked among his most successful publications during his lifetime. But the four-handed configuration was also a critical medium for the transmission and reception of much of his orchestral and chamber music. The many piano transcriptions of Schubert’s instrumental music arranged for four-hands issued by publishers over the course of the nineteenth century allowed any two decently practised amateur pianists a chance to get to know his music by reproducing it in the domestic space of the bourgeois parlour.

Relatively few works of ancient literature survive intact. Many more are known only as fragments or through the testimony of other authors. How should literary history acknowledge the fact and the consequences of such extensive loss? This chapter reviews the difficulties in identifying and presenting the evidence for lost works, explores what (besides their hypothetical reconstruction) can be learned from their remains, and considers how accommodation of the lost and the fragmentary challenges historians of literature to rethink the objectives and the methods of their enterprise.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, was a tremendous success and the source of intense polemic when it first appeared in 1852. Since then, the novel has never entirely disappeared from the scene and has remained the locus of heated discussion on the representation of race and on race relations in the United States. This chapter will attempt to trace the role Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Stowe’s novel, but also its rewritings, tie-ins, and adaptations – has played in discussions of race in the United States since the 1850s. The first part will investigate the inception of the novel, its strategies, publishing circumstances, and immediate reception. The second part will focus on the afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both in terms of scholarly commentary and popular appropriations.

The AD 637 Islamic conquest of Antioch has been typically held as the city’s swan song. Conversely, this article shows that the new realities of power ushered in a new phase in the life of the city and lingered on the memory and myth of the city of Seleucus Nicator.

This chapter looks at approximately a millennium of ancient reception, from factors pertaining to the writing and early circulation of Gorgias to the commentary on the work by Olympiodorus in the sixth century of our era. The dialogue was not written for light-hearted entertainment but as a vehicle for serious philosophy. Early readers must have included Plato’s rival Isocrates, whose Against the Sophists criticizes material early in the work, while inspiring 519b-d. Aristotle made extensive use of it in the Rhetoric, but may have thought its ethics superceded. A range of allusions in the spurious Alcibiades II strongly suggests that Gorgias was well-known by the late fourth century. It was widely read thereafter, thanks to rhetoricians and grammarians. Commentaries emerged from the Platonist schools, from Taurus to Olympiodorus, and may be supplemented from other philosophic discussion. Dodds had a low regard for Olympiodorus, taking little account of the task faced by the Alexandrian commentator. Some examples show how this view caused him to overlook places where Olympiodorus’ offers assistance, or even to misreport what he says. I conclude with the value of studying the ancient reception for enhancing our view of Plato.

Chapter 36 reflects on the ways in which Goethe’s meaning and value have evolved. Analysis of Goethe’s legacy and reception demands that we attend to the historical situation of the readers too, and that we remain alert to the role of politics in shaping responses to and uses of his work. The chapter considers Goethe’s afterlife in a variety of contexts, from his prominence in German secondary education between 1871 and 1914 to the mixed feelings of German-Jewish readers in the 1930s. It also analyses Goethe’s own interventions in his reception.

During his lifetime, Swift was a national figure in Ireland: the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Drapier, the Hibernian Patriot. Following his death, Swift became an inescapable presence in the thought of Irish writers of many different political persuasions. This chapter charts Swift’s posthumous reputation in Ireland. Whereas English writers such as Thackeray and Macaulay denied Swift’s Irish identity altogether, many Irish writers claimed Swift as one of their own. This chapter presents a broad survey of how Swift’s Irishness has been received by Irish writers including Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Austin Clarke, Bendam Kennelly, and Derek Mahon.

This chapter focuses on Swift’s reception in eighteenth-century Germany. The first section focuses on German translations of A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels; an eight-volume anthology of Satyrische und ernsthafte Schriften von Dr. Jonathan Swift was published between 1756 and 1766, which helped secure Swift’s place in the literary canon. Alongside these translations were creative imitations, which are the focus of the second section. The strongest contender for the title of ‘German Swiftʼ, this chapter argues, is Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, better known as Jean Paul (1763–1825), who would jocularly describe himself as a thief who had freely pilfered from the Dean’s quarry.

Most early responses to Swift’s work were fuelled by personal and political opinion. However, as this chapter shows, some responses were also critically significant. In the later eighteenth century, the amusement that had originally greeted many of Swift’s works was replaced by disapproval of their smutty informality. Although early readers and imitators had discerned Swift’s frequent use of a constructed narrator, most later eighteenth-century critics rather witlessly conflated Swift the man with his disturbed personae, and recoiled accordingly. A section on his later reception, Swift was either ignored or disliked by Romantic poets and novelists; the few exceptions were those interested in satire or political journalism. Despite Thackeray’s denunciation of Swift’s beastliness in 1853, by the turn of the century Swift was a towering example of the power of English literature.

This chapter explores Swift’s reception during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the early twentieth century, Swift was reinterpreted as a proleptic modernist, complete with convoluted personal life and affinity for marginal spaces. But as the century wore on, his writings were often enlisted to express covert criticism of authoritarian regimes. This chapter is divided into five sections. The first looks at the various editions and biographies of Swift that have appeared since 1900, and the critical controversies that have risen from these scholarly projects. The second section charts the fluctuating reception of Swift’s writings on Ireland. The third provides an overview of recent work on Swift’s engagement with eighteenth-century science and medicine. The fourth focuses on gender and sexuality. And the fifth and final section explores Swift’s afterlives and future directions in Swift scholarship.

No country outside Britain has embraced Vaughan Williams’s music more warmly and extensively than the USA. The composer first visited in 1922 (extended stays followed in 1932 and 1954), but he had earlier developed a sympathy for American democratic ideals through intense involvement with Walt Whitman’s poetry. Vaughan Williams’s stature in America grew steadily from around 1920, when major works, most notably A London Symphony, began to be performed regularly, and it reached a zenith in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was widely regarded as a major international figure in the same league as Stravinsky or Bartók. While his American reputation echoed the deepening Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ that developed during the alliances of the Second World War and the Cold War, advocacy from a wide range of European émigrés such as Serge Koussevitzky and Bruno Walter indicates a broad appeal reaching well beyond any narrow notion of Anglo-Saxon kinship. Vaughan Williams’s profound engagement with folk song, modality, Whitman, and the symphony aligned particularly closely with prevailing trends in American music c. 1930–60, and his impact can be felt in the work of composers like Samuel Barber and Roy Harris; more recently, the admiration of John Adams, among others, indicates continuing relevance.

This chapter provides an introduction to how Vaughan Williams’s music was received in interwar continental Europe, particularly within music magazines and scholarly periodicals. It is in two sections. The first considers the different contexts in which it was heard: choral performances of the Mass and folk-song arrangements, pieces played at International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festivals, and performances of large-scale works in ‘seasonal’ orchestral concerts and recitals. For the most part, Vaughan Williams’s music was well received, even at ISCM festivals, where he might have been overshadowed by more radical figures; and the increased number of European performances that he received during the period reflected a growing interest among leading continental performers. The chapter then examines some of the writing on Vaughan Williams by continental critics, primarily those from France and Germany. These reveal two contrasting but not necessarily mutually exclusive narratives: one in which Vaughan Williams is presented as the leader of a new English school of composition that is underpinned by the language of English folk song, and another in which Vaughan Williams is considered in a pan-European context, where the influence of French impressionism is more keenly felt. A table of selected performances is also included.