BOBC |
Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Marshall2015a Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Pax Romana", Classical antiquity, Hickman. Jonathan, Religion, Science Fiction, USA Creators: Marshall, Rogers, Stevens Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press (New York) Collection: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction |
Views: 43/1033
|
Attachments |
Abstract |
“C. W. Marshall treats a different modern vision of Imperial Rome in the form of a comic in which the Catholic Church sends soldiers back in time to help Emperor Constantine and Christianity “win” a perceived centuries-long war against paganism. Marshall argues that, once the relevant history is changed, the reader is presented with a world that never left antiquity. It may thus be argued that much of what we think we know about antiquity depends less on “fact” than on an overwhelming cultural continuity, an epistemology or episteme. Marshall’s particular epistemological point usefully serves to raise questions generally applicable to the volume’s collected work. In concert, the chapters in this part and in the volume as a whole thus position us to ask: What is “antiquity,” truly, and how does its definition depend on the intervention of the Middle Ages and subsequent history? Without those particular receptions, how would “antiquity” seem to be shaped? In particular, the question raised by this volume is: How do classical receptions in SF work to reconstitute antiquity, or to do away with it? Do classical receptions in SF function like matter transporters, reconstituting materials from antiquity in a new place and time? Or are they rather like disintegrators, scattering the “atoms” of ancient materials irrevocably?” Added by: joachim Last edited by: joachim |