Abstract

Reception studies is rapidly becoming one of the most dynamic new specializations in classics. In light of the changing theoretical and methodological climate that has settled in the field of classics as a whole, studies on reception and the classical tradition have become increasingly more nuanced as classicists explore the intricate transmission of classical literature and culture through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and even well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The influence of the classical world finds its way into the very fabric of our Western identity, but non-Western cultures, too, are often confronted with the legacy of the ancients as a symbolic system of otherness at play in those cultures' constructions of self. The result of this recognition is a significant increase in the critical work done on the reception of classical culture.