Ancient Epic in Film and Television

by Amanda Potter (Editor), Hunter Gardner (Editor)

Overview

How do epic tropes shape representations of the ancient world and determine contemporary understandings of historical events? What features of ancient epic persistently emerge in science fiction and fantasy narratives adapted to the screen, and why? How does the different scope of televisual versus cinematic media impact the representation of conventions derived from ancient epic?
The international range of contributors to this volume respond to these questions by looking for features of epic outside the traditional realm of Greco-Roman antiquity, including historical films and series, fantasy, science fiction and documentary. By identifying epic conventions on the large and small screen, as well as within a range of speculative fictions in fantastical and futuristic settings, they consider the function of such conventions within their twenty-first-century production contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474473750
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	07/17/2023
Series:	Screening Antiquity
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Amanda Potter is a Visiting Fellow at the Open University, where she was awarded her PhD in 2014 for her thesis on viewer reception of classical myth in Xena: Warrior Princess and Charmed. Her main research interest is public engagement with the ancient world, including audience reception of classics in popular film and television, and creative engagement with classical mythology and ancient history. She has published on a number of television series and films including Xena: Warrior Princess, Charmed, Doctor Who and spinoffs, Wonder Woman, Game of Thrones, HBO’s Rome and STARZ Spartacus.

Hunter Gardner is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature (OUP, 2019). She is co-editor of Nostos: Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures (Ohio State UniversityPress, 2014), Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (OUP, 2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The past and future of ancient epic – Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner

Part I: Surge and splendour: Ancient epic conventions on the silver screen

1. Spatial projections in ancient and screen epic: A view with (a) room – Dan Curley

2. Allusions to Homeric epic in contemporary films, 1984-2019 – Jon Solomon

3. “Mighty saga of the world’s mightiest man”: Is there such a thing as a modern Hercules epic? – Emma Stafford

4. Vergilian echoes of horror in Snowpiercer (2013): Engine and empire without end – Jennifer Rea

5. A Roman Epic in Modern Japan Screening Rome as Empire Nostalgia in Takeuchi Hideki’s Thermae Romae (2012) – Monica Cyrino

6. Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Helen of Troy and the Trojan Horse – Kirsten Day

Part. II: From gold to platinum: Epic conventions on the small screen

7. Revival of mythic epics or epic failure? – On gods and heroes in the television shows Olympus (2015) and Troy: Fall of a City (2018) – Sylvie Magerstädt

8. Travels with Odysseus and the Odyssey in twenty-first-century television documentaries – Fiona Hobden

9. Many (un) happy Returns in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011 – 2019) – Hunter Gardner

10. The Performance of War: Battle as Spectacle in the Iliad and Into the Badlands (2015 – 2019) – Jo Wynell-Mayow

11. Homeric Intimacy in NBC’s Hannibal (2013 – 2015) – Lyn Kozak

12. The gods in epic television: The Homeric cosmos in Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) – Meredith Safran

13. Towards a Definition of Twenty-First Century Epic: Audience Responses to Game of Thrones (2011 – 2019) and His Dark Materials (2019 -) as Epic Television – Amanda Potter

Afterword – Joanna Paul

Editorial Reviews

Gardner and Potter have produced a fascinating collection of essays on epic screen productions that defines the epic genre outside its traditional parameters and covers a wide variety of shows across different decades from the 1980s to 2021.

Professor Antony Augoustakis