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This book tells the story of the modern engagement with the area of South Italy where ancient Greeks established settlements starting in the 8th century BCE–a region known since antiquity as Magna Graecia. This ‘Great Greece’, at once Greek and Italian, and continuously perceived as a region in decline since its archaic golden age, has long been relegated to the margins of classical studies. The present analysis recovers its significance within the history of classical archaeology. It was in South Italy that the Renaissance first encountered an ancient Greek landscape, and in the ‘Hellenic turn’ of eighteenth-century Europe the temples of Paestum and the painted vases excavated in South Italy played major roles, but since then, Magna Graecia–lying outside the national boundaries of modern Greece, and sharing in the complicated regional dynamic of the Italian Mezzogiorno in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-has fitted awkwardly into the commonly accepted paradigms of Hellenism. Drawing on antiquarian and archaeological writings, travelogues and modern historiography, and recent rewritings of the history and imagining of South Italy, this study identifies and elaborates the crucial place of Magna Graecia within the creation of modern archaeology. It is an Italian story with European resonance, which offers a unique perspective on the Humanist investment in the ancient past, while it transforms our understanding of the transition from antiquarianism to archaeology; of the relationship between nation-making and institution-building in the study of the ancient past; and of the reconstruction of classical Greece in the modern world.

This book explores Toni Morrison's widespread engagement with ancient Greek and the Roman tradition. It examines the ways in which classical myth, literature, history, social practice, and religious ritual make their presence felt in all ten of Morrison's novels published to date. Combining close readings with theoretical discussion, it argues that Morrison's classical allusiveness is characterized by a strategic ambivalence. It demonstrates that Morrison's classicism is fundamental to the transformative critique of American history and culture that her work effects: the novelist deploys the classical tradition to rewrite narratives about America's discovery and colonization, about the founding of the new nation, about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, about black migration and urbanization, and about segregation and the Civil Rights Movement. The volume positions Morrison within a genealogy of intellectuals who have challenged the purported conservative nature of Greek and Roman tradition, and who have revealed its construction as a ‘white’, pure, and purifying force to be a fabrication of the Enlightenment. Exploring the ways Morrison's dialogue with Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, and Ovid relates to her simultaneous dialogue with a diverse range of American literary forebears such as Cotton Mather, Willa Cather, Pauline Hopkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, this book shows that Morrison's classicism enables her to fulfil her own imperative that ‘the past has to be revised’.