Explores the importance and complexity of classical allusiveness in the modern American novel Explores both the sheer extent and the ideologically-invested nature of classical allusiveness in the modern American novelSheds significant new light on canonical and often-taught major American novelistsSynthesizes and builds on existing research to demonstrate how a proper understanding of each writer’s classical allusiveness contributes to broad debates about modernism and postmodernism, intertextuality and the history and categorization of the American novelDraws on the methodologies and insights of Classical Reception studies as well as American studies, and makes an invaluable contribution to both fieldsIncludes a user-friendly glossary that explains all the classical names, concepts and words This book is an invaluable survey of the allusions to ancient Greek and Roman culture in the work of seven major modern American novelists: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Marilynne Robinson. Making the classical world accessible to all readers, it combines new close readings of three key texts by each author with overviews of the essential prior scholarship in the field. It also builds on archival research in documenting the nature and extent of each author’s own familiarity with classical literature and languages.

This pioneering study provides penetrating and illuminating analysis of the creative and ideological manipulation of some central texts of ancient Greek and Roman literature in a set of key modern American novels, bringing together the disciplines of classical reception and American studies in a rich and revealing combination. * Stephen Harrison, University of Oxford *
It fulfils the needs of a classical novitiate like myself remarkably fluently. The way in which [the book] covers so much ground so efficiently and accessibly is something a lot of academics could learn from… Coming into it, I generally treated classical references as simplistic monuments of erudition, but I feel I now have some understanding of how they can be made fascinatingly productive grounds of tension with a little interrogation. -- James Bowen, undergraduate studying English at Merton College, Oxford

Tessa Roynon is a Senior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, where she teaches American and world literature. Internationally renowned for her work on Toni Morrison, she has published extensively on numerous modern American novelists including E.L. Doctorow, Ralph Ellison, Jeffrey Eugenides and Marilynne Robinson. Her second sole-authored book, Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture (OUP, 2013), was awarded the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize in 2015.