From her seminal Eros the Bittersweet (1986) to her experimental
Float (2016), Bakkhai (2017) and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019),
Anne Carson's engagement with antiquity has been deeply influential to
generations of readers, both inside and outside of academia. One reason
for her success is the versatile scope of her classically-oriented
oeuvre, which she rethinks across multiple media and categories. Yet an
equally significant reason is her profile as a classicist. In this role,
Carson unfailingly refuses to conform to the established conventions and
situated practices of her discipline, in favour of a mode of reading
classical literature that allows for interpretative and creative
freedom.
From a multi-praxis, cross-disciplinary perspective, the volume explores
the erudite indiscipline of Carson's classicism as it emerges in her
poetry, translations, essays, and visual artistry. It argues that her
classicism is irreducible to a single vision, and that it is best
approached as integral to the protean character of her artistic thought.
Anne Carson/Antiquity collects twenty essays by poets, translators,
artists, practitioners and scholars. It offers the first collective
study of the author's classicism, while drawing attention to one of the
most avant-garde, multifaceted readings of the classical past.
