Stuart Gillespie 
English Translation and Classical Reception 
Towards a New Literary History

English Translation and Classical Reception is the first
genuine cross-disciplinary study bringing English literary history
to bear on questions about the reception of classical literary
texts, and vice versa. The text draws on the author’s
exhaustive knowledge of the subject from the early Renaissance to
the present.

* The first book-length study of English translation as a topic
in classical reception

* Draws on the author’s exhaustive knowledge of English
literary translation from the early Renaissance to the present

* Argues for a remapping of English literary history which would
take proper account of the currently neglected history of classical
translation, from Chaucer to the present

* Offers a widely ranging chronological analysis of English
translation from ancient literatures

* Previously little-known, unknown, and sometimes suppressed
translated texts are recovered from manuscripts and explored in
terms of their implications for English literary history and for
the interpretation of classical literature

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface vi

Acknowledgements viii

Note on Texts x

1. Making the Classics Belong: A Historical Introduction 1

2. Creative Translation 20

3. English Renaissance Poets and the Translating Tradition 33

4. Two-Way Reception: Shakespeare’s Influence on Plutarch 47

5 Transformative Translation: Dryden’s Horatian Ode 60

6. Statius and the Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Poetry 76

7. Classical Translation and the Formation of the English Literary Canon 93

8. Evidence for an Alternative History: Manuscript Translations of the Long Eighteenth Century 104

9. Receiving Wordsworth, Receiving Juvenal: Wordsworth’s Suppressed Eighth Satire 123

10. The Persistence of Translations: Lucretius in the Nineteenth Century 150

11. ‚Oddity and struggling dumbness‘: Ted Hughes’s Homer 163

12. Afterword 180

References 183

Index of Ancient Authors and Passages 200

General Index 203

Über den Autor

THE AUTHOR

STUART GILLESPIE is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His recent publications include Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources (2001), Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, edited with Neil Rhodes (2006), and The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, edited with Philip Hardie (2007). He edits the journal Translation and Literature and is co-editor of the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English.