Ancient Epic in Film and Television

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Edited by Amanda Potter and Hunter Gardner

Type: Studies
Subject: Genre > Fantasy
Keywords: fantasy, ancien epic
Publishing date: 2021
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Collection: Screening Antiquity
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 296 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4744-7374-3

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Book Presentation:
Examines representations of ancient epic and epic conventions in film and television
• Demonstrates how adaptation and revision of ancient epic conventions facilitate the articulation of emerging ideals concerning gender, class, race, and nationality
• Analyses recently emerging screen technologies exploring how these technologies have facilitated the capacity of recent films and television to augment the spatiality, distance, and ontological scope identified as crucial components of the epic genre
• Explores how the conventions of epic have informed televisual production as the medium enters its "platinum" age of production and distribution
• Responds to recent work on the epic genre that has gestured toward speculative fiction as a site for the reception and development of generic conventions characteristic of ancient epic

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.

About the authors:
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 University Press, 2014), Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (OUP, 2013).

Press 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, Department of the Classics, University of Illinois

See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press

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