Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas

Book excerpt: Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas illuminates the remarkable range of Greco-Roman classical receptions across the western hemisphere from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. Bringing together fifteen essays by scholars working at the intersection of Classics and all aspects of Americanist studies, this unique collection examines how Hispanophone, Lusophone, Anglophone, Francophone, and/or Indigenous individuals engaged with Greco-Roman literary cultures and materials. By coming at the matter from a multilingual transhemispheric perspective, it disrupts prevailing accounts of classical reception in the Americas which have typically privileged North over South, Anglophone over non-Anglophone, and the cultural production of hegemonic groups over that of more marginalized others. Instead it offers a fresh account of how Greco-Roman literatures and ideas were in play from Canada to the Southern Cone to the Caribbean, treating classical reception in the early Americas as a dynamic, polyvocal phenomenon which is truly transhemispheric in reach.