This chapter provides an account of epic katabases (journeys to the Underworld) and treats the Underworld as both a theme and a location in early hexameter poetry. Sekita presents an overview of Underworld scenes and motifs featuring in Homer and Hesiod, and as reconstructed in the Epic Cycle and other epic poets. She also summarises the main scholarly achievements and developments regarding the possible interpretations of this material, including its reception in the iconography of Attic and Apulian vase-painting and place in the broader Mediterranean tradition.

This chapter focuses on three Virgilian entrances to the underworld – Cumae (Aen. 6.237–42), Ampsanctus (Aen. 7. 563–71) and Tainaron (G. 4.464-470). Using the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia (other space) the author argues that these three spaces legitimate multiple forms of religious knowledge, which are, however, linked to the progressive imposition of Augustan authority.

Troy is fated to destruction so that Aeneas will fulfil World Fate in settling in Hesperia, as Hector and Creusa tell him, Venus and Creusa convincing him that his Homeric defence of Troy is contrary to fate. Latinus assents to Aeneas as the fated husband of his daughter Lavinia, but is forced to open the Gates of Janus against Aeneas by Amata, whose rejection of known fate sways the day. Turnus knows fate but resists it out of his Homeric sense of honour, which makes him commit mistakes on a general scale, as in the ambush on Aeneas’ troops. Ultimately, however, he comes to accept the importance of fate, and un-Homerically to face Aeneas alone as a sacrifice one-for-all. Aeneas gradually wishes to assent to fate, as when he follows the advice of Nautes to ‘follow’ where fate leads, and in particular when Anchises in the Underworld fires Aeneas with a desire for what is to be. He counters Turnus’ Homeric individualism by his focus on the wider vision of World Fate. However, when he kills Turnus he fails Stoicism, which commended clementia. He therefore remains a Stoic ‘progressor’, not a Sage, even though he does set the stage for World Fate and the formation of Rome.

This chapter embarks from the observation that ancient Greek settlements occupied three categorically separate yet interwoven landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined environment. It traces their presence at Hermione in the south-eastern Argolid to disclose multiple levels and layers of localisation and steers the investigation to places where all of these vectors combined. In the highly inclusive cult of Demeter Chthonia, the blend included communal preference, local vegetation, and a deliberately local variant of underworld conceptions. The cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione involved the killing of a frisky cow with sickles by four old women. It appears impossible to explain why the cow ritual took the idiosyncratic form that it did. Yet the comparison with cults of Demeter Chthonia elsewhere suggests the close interplay between agricultural and eschatological aspects. Although united with other Demeter cults under the same epiclesis and in accordance with the polymorphous nature of Greek religion, the cult in Hermione attests to lively conversations with the specific features of the local landscape, and the desire of the community to make sense of it.

This chapter embarks from the observation that ancient Greek settlements occupied three categorically separate yet interwoven landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined environment. It traces their presence at Hermione in the south-eastern Argolid to disclose multiple levels and layers of localisation and steers the investigation to places where all of these vectors combined. In the highly inclusive cult of Demeter Chthonia, the blend included communal preference, local vegetation, and a deliberately local variant of underworld conceptions. The cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione involved the killing of a frisky cow with sickles by four old women. It appears impossible to explain why the cow ritual took the idiosyncratic form that it did. Yet the comparison with cults of Demeter Chthonia elsewhere suggests the close interplay between agricultural and eschatological aspects. Although united with other Demeter cults under the same epiclesis and in accordance with the polymorphous nature of Greek religion, the cult in Hermione attests to lively conversations with the specific features of the local landscape, and the desire of the community to make sense of it.

This chapter examines the middle-class milieu and setting of much of Salman Rushdie’s work. Such an exploration of the upwardly mobile, increasingly affluent, and globally connected Indian bourgeoisie highlights their elaborate lifestyle and aspirations. Another common thread binding the characters in Rushdie’s novels is the city of Bombay/Mumbai. This is the city that his middle-class bourgeois characters share with the criminal classes and the entertainment industry. In Mumbai the lines between the legitimate and the criminal are very often blurred, and many of Rushdie’s protagonists find themselves teetering over the abyss of the underworld. Those of Rushdie’s characters that have moved into global spaces of power and affluence are still umbilically attached to their natal city, where they were born middle-class, but have achieved wealth through crime or the world of entertainment, and have either voluntarily left the island city or have had to flee it. Instead of an omnibus overview, this chapter offers an in-depth analysis of Rushdie’s upwardly mobile middle class as they move from Bombay to London and from there to the new world in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and The Golden House.

This chapter explores how the spatial segregation of Potsdamer Platz is not a matter of architectural design, but rather a particular social mapping that interrelates with status. Potsdamer Platz is designed to reinforce status hierarchies that separate the upperworld and underworld. Whereas the upperworld is shiny and spacious, the underworld is dark, labyrinthine, cramped and malodorous. These worlds have distinct populations: shoppers, tourists, white-collar workers and wealthy residents above, cleaners and other workers below. The cleaners have access to the upperworld for the purpose of cleaning it, but the people from above cannot enter the underworld. It remains hidden, buried spatially and discursively, making cleaners into an invisible “presence from below.” However, cleaners experience themselves and their place at Potsdamer Platz not just as an invisible presence from below. They are part of a workers’ scene that extends from the corporate underworld to the upperworld. The underworld is also more than a dark and sticky space for them. They turn to it as a place of social encounters, of taking breaks and withdrawing from the gaze of managers and clients alike.

Don DeLillo is a profoundly religious writer. He is a religious writer because of the questions he asks rather than the answers he finds. He is a religious writer because of how he depicts characters wrestling with moral problems, not because of how those characters emerge victorious from such battles. He is a religious writer because his work is persistently drawn to sacred encounters with the numinous, immanent, and transcendent, even though such moments may prove illusory and are always transient. This chapter traces the evolution of critical perspectives on DeLillo as a religious writer, beginning with postmodern critiques of his metaphysical preoccupations, to defenses of DeLillo’s redemptive moral vision, through post-secular reassessments of his enduring reverence for quotidian mystery. The chapter then examines specific manifestations of spirituality in several DeLillo works, particularly White Noise, Libra, and Underworld. DeLillo raises religious questions and offers responses ranging from parodic skepticism to partial faith. He features religious meditations which glow with quotidian mystery yet remain enveloped by an impenetrable cloud of unknowing.

Don DeLillo, this chapter argues, has created innovative narratives from the typecast materials of popular genre fiction. It demonstrates that genre novels and films, from spy thrillers and noir to mafia stories and horror, have often served DeLillo as, counterintuitively, a blank canvas – not as a narrowing template or pre-determined plot but as grounds for subversion, especially of the ideologies popular genres tend to encode, including the myths of individual agency with which DeLillo’s characters often strongly (and wrongheadedly) identify. DeLillo has remained interested in responding to generic narratives throughout his nearly fifty-year career because genres’ tired conventions and predictable endings often act as foils to his far more distinctive explorations of violence and death, that real-world ending, particularly in his late-career invocations of horror. The chapter examines primarily examples from Running Dog, Players, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, and Point Omega.

Throughout DeLillo's fiction, DeLillo, like Underworld's Nick Shay, shakes free from the constraints of his own biographical history and personal relationship with the Bronx in particular.

Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.

Don DeLillo’s fiction has long catalogued American fear and dread surrounding the future. While a select few texts, most memorably Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007), foreground a sense of narrative and cultural possibility, the future is often depicted as a lament. That sense of future vision is evident in his latest text – at the time of writing – Zero K (2016), which explores environmental decline and a shift from Underworld’s ideal of a democratic collective to a neoliberal embrace of necropolitics. Using both ecocriticism and a range of prior DeLillo scholarship, this chapter reads Zero K as a prescient warning of political upheaval and loss, and thus anticipates how hope and renewal can be located even in DeLillo’s late period writings.

As an anatomist of socially inculcated identities, DeLillo deploys a recurring motif of automobility, which helps to dramatize and often satirize some common white American male inclinations. Propelled by a sense of something missing in their routinely plotted lives, DeLillo’s protagonists often lurch into escape mode in an archetypal white American male way, by jumping in a car and hitting the road. However, their clichéd and encapsulating choice of vehicular transport itself signals how difficult it can be to escape an identity largely formed by negation, that is, by white masculinity’s self-defining exploitation of others. Given the conceptual emptiness that DeLillo finds at the heart of white American male identity, pursuits of a seemingly more genuine self usually result in such protagonists driving themselves right back to where they more or less began.

DeLillo’s fiction acts as a commentary on the human condition and its relation to spatial stimuli. New York City represents a fixed point of reference that the author revisits and continuously extracts meaning from its inhabitants’ movement throughout the cityscape and the architectural constructs that affect their lives.

Examining the trajectories of paranoia and apocalypse in the matrix of Cold War dichotomies throughout DeLillo’s opus, this chapter examines DeLillo's emphasis on class and professions in relation to his Cold War fiction.

In an article on football in DeLillo’s work written for The New Yorker, Jake Nivens   discusses how the sport became “fertile material for [DeLillo's] career-long investigation of language”. The shared prominence of football within End Zone (1972) and The Silence (2020) is telling, but DeLillo’s interest in sport in general extends throughout much of his work. As Nivens suggests, language is key to how this theme develops – however, analysing sports in DeLillo’s writing more broadly may enable discussion of other aspects of his work.

Many existing studies of sport in DeLillo’s writing focus on particular depictions within particular texts. For example, the role of football in End Zone has been the subject of much critical investigation. Similarly, baseball plays a pivotal role in Underworld (1997) –most famously in its semi-autonomous prologue. Building on these studies, this chapter provides a broad overview of DeLillo’s writing on sports, tracing the ways it provides a unique corpus of work within his oeuvre. It traces the development of this theme as it oscillates in importance throughout his career, exploring the commercial and critical responses it has been subject to.

The prophecy of future Roman greatness that Aeneas hears from his father Anchises in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid is not mere triumphalism, but shows the strong influence both of Plato’s apocalyptic myths in the Republic and of Cicero’s adaptations of Plato in his Somnium Scipionis. The vision of future Roman history is severely qualified when viewed through the perspective of philosophical scepticism about human glory and worldly achievement.

Ancient Egypt, its society, law and belief system were brought into being, and sustained, by the threat and application of violence in the form of cruel and unusual punishments intended unabashedly to intimidate. The ‘Big Man’ role which informs the office of kingship from the outset of Egyptian history, maintains itself on celestial as well as terrestrial levels. The fertility of valley and delta promised untold agricultural riches to the human community if there was general cooperation; it was essential therefore to deter free thought and action by all available means of violent force. Prosperity would come through the plans of a single authority, not the collective debate of a people. Similarly, in Egypt’s sphere of influence whole-hearted subservience was required on pain of violent punishment. From the third millennium BCE Egypt had begun the process of cloning this life to produce a heaven and hell.

The Homeric epics contain many and sometimes detailed references to funeral customs and rites that reflect several elements of Early Iron Age practices, although without exact correspondence. The Homeric evidence is compared and contrasted with the archaeology of burial practices in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Aegean.