Thispiece offers a introduction and overview of thekey themes established in the collection of essays in Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity: The Shock of the Old. It opens by alluding to the Victorian pride in progress, in technology, in travel – in the newness of modernity. It proceeds to point out, however, that it was a critical engagement with the past that most challenged how Victorians understood the world and their place in it. In other words, this Victorian anxiety about progress was fed by the shock of the old. The piece then introduces thecore thesis of the volume as a whole, which is thatVictorian encounters with the past – though quintessentially modern – can only be properly understood through the nineteenth century’s passionate exploration of the interaction between religion and historicity, between the theological and the classical, between the Bible and classical antiquity.

This chapter documents the differences in the five novelists’ representation of the Greek past – mythical, archaic, classical and Hellenistic. I distinguished two groups: Xenophon and Longus each offer very little myth or history before the period of the events they narrate; Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, on the other hand, not only use much circumstantial detail to build up a classical or (in Achilles Tatius’ case) Hellenistic world in which their story is set, but also give that world temporal depth by exploitation of mythology, and occasionally by introducing events or persons from earlier Greek history. Xenophon’s and Achilles Tatius’ worlds are such that their similarity with that of readers can almost be taken for granted, with little incentive to ask in what way and to what effect these worlds are to any degree different from their own. Chariton and Heliodorus are different: the more or less determinable historical setting combines with a decidedly contemporary σφραγίς to give readers both a strong sense of Greek cultural continuity and the opportunity to identify features where their contemporary Greek world might be significantly different: the most important such difference is Roman control of the Greek world, which is also strongly hinted at by Longus despite his choice of a timeless, predominantly rural context.

Chapter 1 begins by considering three instances of Faulkner’s writing reused in new contexts: Malcolm Cowley’s 1946 Portable Faulkner; a commonplace book of Faulkner quotations published in 2000; and the current use of the line from his 1951 book Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as a widely circulated shorthand for persistent racial inequities that makes him, for many readers, more relevant today than at the height of his post-Nobel fame in the 1950s. While Faulkner seems to have meant this line as a critique of one character’s view, he likely would not object to the current use of the phrase due to his particular view of history whereby old artistic works take on new life by their use in the present. The chapter examines how Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! stages the issue of using documents, here in the form of letters, to construct an historical narrative. While Faulkner is widely understood today as a kind of historian, this chapter shows how he is more concerned with the ways in which historical texts, along with works of the imagination, create a sense of the past as an inherently multimedia endeavor.

This chapter furthers the discourse on “narrative” with specificity on “magic, memory, myth, and metaphor.” Herein, the chapter shows that the knowledge of the past is preserved in oral vehicles as “songs, images, poems, rituals and religions, stories and myths,” as memories not only preserve but sustain them by transporting them to succeeding generations, using narrative when evoked. It also examines memory’s limitations, especially when compared to history. They include “bias (of the narrator), misinformation, infallibility and the impossibility of rightly (in)validating (individual) memories”–the lack of corroborator. It is also prone to manipulation and subject to the narrator’s interest, while the information processed and stored as memory can also fade over time owing to the collection of new memories. In the Yoruba context, the chapter highlights the relationship between “Itan” and “Aroba,” with the major distinguishing factor being their timeframe from the period of happening. The chapter also dwells on collective memory, which relies on individuals’ narration to become one because no one person was present everywhere to witness everything at once. Lastly, there is the clarification of the different problems in African epistemology, such as magic and the likes.

The problem, according to Janaway, is that the unchangeable past appears to overwhelm the future in such a way that it is impossible for us to create anything new. This is the meaning of that key moment in TSZ where Zarathustra is devastated by the pessimistic teaching that all is empty, all is the same, all has been (ZII: “The Soothsayer”). If he cannot creatively transform the present-day human into his envisioned future superhuman, Zarathustra loses his reason for living. But then he awakens his dormant thought of eternal recurrence and realizes that he can in fact create the past from the perspective of the present moment. Given the thought of eternal recurrence, the past is no longer closed and hence the future remains open too.

Chapter 1 identifies three lines of research that stand in the way of compositionality and sketches the Babylonian confusion of terms that are in use for dealing with tense and aspect. In this way, it prepares for a central theme: how to deal with the persistent unclarity about the opposition between perfect(-ive) vs imperfect(-ive). A strict compositional approach aims at unravelling this tangle.

This essay summarizes the renewed and expanded perspectives on Caribbean literature made possible by the three-volume critical project to which it contributes the final essay. It then addresses three of the most pertinent issues facing Caribbean literature and literary studies as it moves further into the twenty-first century: first, how the future of Caribbean literary criticism will be shaped as much by what we rediscover about its past as by what is yet to come; second, how critical models might evolve as we reach the limit point of cascading inclusions; and third, questions of accessing and preserving literary sources (past, present and future), with a cautious appraisal of the promise of digital humanities.

This chapter examines the evocation of New Amsterdam within contemporary novels of New York. You would think that, considering its humble, yet extraordinary beginnings as New Amsterdam, New York’s earliest history as a multicultural, multilingual Dutch settlement might have generated its own literature. However, this origin point is largely absent within American literary history. By assessing how New York’s Dutch origins have been featured in contemporary literature, this chapter examines Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Teju Cole’s Open City and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. These novels are examined for how New Amsterdam is set as the scene for New York’s present and its future.

Current conditions are placed in the context of past experience in order to identify present conditions that may be unprecedented.

The Epilogue summarizes the key findings of each chapter, and reflects on some of the larger implications of the basic argument of the book, namely that engagements with the past in early China were less a matter of cultural attitude than they were deliberate ideological mobilization towards various political ends.

The Introduction describes the basic arguments and scope of the book. It gives a survey of the secondary scholarship on the subject, with the contention that scholars had focused mostly on historiographical texts and neglected to study ideas of the past across the broader corpus. Moreover, it argues that there is a culturalist bias in their readings that reduces the early Chinese engagement with the past to a matter of cultural attitude. On the basis of this survey of secondary scholarship, the Introduction describes the specific perspective and methods of this study. First, it will engage with a variety of materials, both historiographical and non-historiographical; second, it will approach early Chinese narratives about the past not as expressions of cultural beliefs but as argumentative utterances in the broader political and ethical debates.