Chapter 4 unpacks the conundrum faced by Restoration acting companies. Audiences wanted new works, spectacle, and theatrical innovation, but the unforeseen consequences of the duopoly hobbled the ability of the companies to respond nimbly to changing conditions. Strapped for money and shackled by the costs of maintaining their expensive, high-tech playhouses, the acting companies were hard pressed to keep up with rival entertainments and products now enticing Londoners. Coffeehouses, spas, pleasure gardens, dance recitals, and music concerts all offered convenience, variety, and value for money. Goods in expanded bourses also tempted consumers. The theatre largely responded to the new world of goods and pastimes through allusion and imitation, oftentimes to brilliant results. Intermedial exchange between the worlds of music and theatre resulted in the gorgeous dramatic operas still staged today. The new consumerism featured in the sparkling, witty comedies spoofing the London elite. Nonetheless, allusiveness could not rival actual experiences and commodities, which often could be had for less money and greater convenience than an afternoon at the playhouse.

The Introduction offers an analysis of the poem’s proem to offer a first example of the methodology of the book and of Statius’ sophisticated engagement with Ovid. A discussion of the historical context in which the poem was composed warns readers about the risks of interpreting the Thebaid only in the light of the anti-Domitianic writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, suggesting the importance of non-literary and material sources. A critical overview of the scholarly debate on the Thebaid and the exploration of ancient reading habits – including the consideration of attestations of Ovidian stories in frescoes and monuments – suggests that intertextuality can consist of interactions of meanings (potentially independent of verbal allusions). Furthermore, texts can engage in dialogue with the semantics of both textual and non-textual narratives. Accordingly, the introduction suggests that the study of the Thebaid’s poetics and politics (broadly understood) involves the exploration of how different kinds of intertextual and intermedial interplays shape the poem’s engagement with both past literary models and the contemporary realities of Flavian Rome.

Using the example of the Corinthian bronzes, this chapter aims to investigate how the encyclopaedist and the epistolographer dealt with luxury items. It analyses two famous passages from the Naturalis Historia on the Corinthian bronzes (34.6-7 and 48), two references to the same material in Pliny the Younger’s third book (3.1 and 3.6) and discusses the treatment of the topic within the frame of the Roman debate on private and public luxury. Rocchi discusses possible intertextual references made by both authors to Cicero’s speech De Signis against Verres in order to show how Cicero’s moralistic remarks on dealing with luxury items such as bronze statues and vessels propound a model of behaviour to Pliny the Younger as a donor of a bronze figurine to his home town of Comum. Finally, Rocchi addresses Pliny’s knowledge and use of the Verrine Orations more generally. In an appendix, he adds some remarks on the Corinthium signum described in Ep. 3.6 and on its lost plinth, as well as on further Corinthian bronzes mentioned in Latin inscriptions.

The introduction outlines the polyphonic and interactive character of Pliny the Younger’s Epistles by first looking at how Pliny constructs time and space of literary interaction in his social environment. The chapter then moves on with a discussion of interdiscursivity and generic interaction in Pliny’s letters and a review of scholarship on intertextuality. A case study of the triptych of letters 4.26-28 demonstrates how various forms of textual and non-textual interaction are combined in Pliny’s Epistles. Whereas the centrepiece of this series, Ep. 4.27 on the recitation of Sentius Augurinus’ poetry, focuses on oral exchange and mnemonic skills, the preceding letter (4.26) foregrounds the materiality of literature by playing with the motif of books as companions (comites) on journeys. The third letter (Ep. 4.28), on the other hand, emphasizes the visibility of famous writers whose portraits were placed and looked at in libraries. In addition to staging various forms of literary interaction, the triptych of Ep. 4.26-28 also showcases the letters’ intermediality. The introduction concludes with a key to the volume’s chapters.

This essay considers the question of Sebald and cinema both in terms of how his texts engage with the medium and how film, in its turn, has treated the author and his works. The argument takes its cue from the essay ‘Kafka im Kino’ (translated as ‘Kafka Goes to the Movies’) in order to discuss the imprint of filmgoing experience that Sebald takes from Kafka, in dialogue with his own. The experience of film viewing raises issues that are central to Sebald’s writing, turning on the potential for identification and community of experience, the reliability of visual evidence and the vicissitudes of memory. These run through the references to film – ranging from early narrative cinema to different modes of documentary film and the French and German new waves – across a set of works by Sebald. The references, extending to medial avatars and intermedial relations, form a ramified network of association, not least in relation to projection and doubling. And the same preoccupations are also seen to reverberate through the cinematic afterlives of Sebald: films in different fictional, documentary and essayistic forms that have drawn – and continue to draw – their inspiration from his writing, also in its intermeshing with his biography.

Sebald was an author deeply devoted to the ethical responsibilities and aesthetic possibilities of literary discourse, and this essay explores the importance of history within his constellation of ethical and aesthetic concerns. Special attention is paid to analysing Sebald’s unique fictional prose form that blurs the boundary between literature and historiography. Distinct from historical novels and documentary fiction, Sebald’s works rely on facts and artefacts as much as they need both memory and imagination. While the traces, repression, and erasure of National Socialist crimes are prominent in his works, the German past is not his only concern. Sebald writes on the Belgian colonial oppression in the Congo, the capitalist exploitation of the Amazon forests, and the massacres caused by Napoleon’s military campaigns. Furthermore, trauma is not limited to human experience in Sebald’s works; he devotes attention to the destruction of nature and animals as well. Focusing on Sebald’s attempts to find appropriate ways to approach the past and individual experience, this essay shows how he creates a literary form that both encourages reader engagement and provides empathetic access to the past.

1986 marked a fresh departure in W.G. Sebald’s literary œuvre. Having written poetry for decades and, for a short time, worked on experimental scripts, Sebald reinvented himself as a prose writer and concentrated on fashioning an innovative form of highly stylized, illustrated docufiction. From approximately July 1986 to early 1988, he worked on a first collection of literary prose that had no official working title and was usually referred to simply as the Prose Project. An unsuccessful funding application provides a detailed insight into what the overall project was supposed to look like, but while Sebald worked on it, the project underwent adaptations and was never published in the originally envisaged form. This essay considers archival material relating to the Prose Project, which reveals the common origins of Vertigo and The Emigrants, and assesses the development of Sebald’s ground-breaking intermedial process and the poetological implications of his turn towards narrative prose.

As popular print ephemera, comics hold a complex and precarious relationship to preservation and duration, which has marked their status as “archivable” (or “non-archivable”) materials. This chapter sketches some of the different ways that institutions, producers, and audiences have coped with this fragility and have defined practices of preservation and collection. The chapter subsequently analyzes comics in libraries and archives, collecting practices by readers and fans, uses of archives in comics production. At each step, it pays particular attention to the importance of materiality, senses, formats, manipulation in the preservation of comics, connecting them to matters of copyright, library policies, and commercial interests. The importance of these parameters is set out against changing notions of archives and archival practice, especially under the impulse of their digital transformation. The broader picture considers the importance of medium specificity in an age of online archival plenitude.

In the Ab Urbe Condita, Livy reports that in 363 BC a dictator was appointed to revive the ancient ritual of the Capitoline nail in the midst of a plague (Livy 7.3.1–9). While recounting this historic episode, Livy provides a detailed description of an inscribed law marking this ritual that was located in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline.

While Tolstoy is best known as a novelist, many become acquainted with his works through musical adaptations. These multinational adaptations span different genres and vary in their degrees of fame, sophistication, and resemblance to the original. This chapter adopts the analogy of a theme and variations to consider the symbiotic relationship between source texts and adaptations. The characteristics unique to literature vis-à-vis music are also discussed to illustrate the advantages and challenges of setting literature, in particular prose, to music. The chapter examines works in each genre with musical analyses and offers genre-specific commentary. In addition to instrumental music, ballet, and opera, musicals are included because they bridge high art and more popular genres and have been instrumental in revitalizing many classics of Russian literature. The chapter concludes with a discussion of operatic adaptations, using Prokofiev’s War and Peace as an example. The opera illustrates many challenges typical of setting sprawling prose texts to music of various genres, such as reducing the number of scenes and characters as well as reimagining the text. The appendix includes a list of adaptations; as many works on the list are not well known, they may be further examined by scholars.

The article introduces to some basic theories on intertextuality and emphasizes the hermeneutical power of the “inter,” the need of a theory of signs and texts and the intermedial bodily conditions of any intertextual interpretation. It provides a short guide for intertextual interpretation.

The role of the foreign and its naturalization in British culture in print, theater and peformance realms; the roles of the audience in the politics of theater both within the British archipelago and across the empire; and the degrees to which the imperial provinces, their peoples, practices and knowledges, were crucial components of metropolitan modernity and claims to global standing.

Paratexts of all kinds became more significant as antiquity wore on. The Homeric epics, for example, and Herodotus’ Histories were not originally divided into books; the canonical book divisions were made only in the Hellenistic period. Despite evidence for the spread of paratexts, editors and scholars often ignore them. They do so, in part, because paratexts are inherently unstable texts; and yet, as ephemeral products of their own literary culture, paratexts provide precious evidence for how poetry was read at any given time or place. The first goal of this chapter is to the collate evidence for section headings, illustrations, and prefaces being produced for poetic texts in the East and West in Late Antiquity in Latin and in Greek. The second goal is to compare their use in each tradition and to analyze where the cultures either converged or departed in their use of paratexts. The evidence collated reveals that new paratextual forms appear around the same time in Greek and Latin, but that there are also separate developments in each tradition.

This chapter examines the peculiar practice, common in late antique epic poetry, of comparing a character to a divinity stripped of their visual attributes. From the works of Claudian, Nonnus, and Colluthus it analyzes three case studies that epitomize this form of comparison and illustrate its use in a specific literary and cultural context. Such comparisons are shown to rely on the reader’s familiarity with visual representations of the pagan gods and to reflect a growing interest in and engagement with the visual arts in late antique literature. In defining characters by attributes they do not possess, the poets draw attention to their visual ambiguity and vulnerability, and allow internal and external audiences to gaze at them uninhibitedly. Female characters in particular are thus proffered as objects of the lusting gaze and are denied individual visual identities and narrative agency. This literary emphasis on artistic beauty, stripped of its attributes and, by extension, divine power, resembles contemporary Christian attempts to de-contextualize pagan artworks by removing their religious attributes and associations, reframing them as purely aesthetic objects.

Both in painting and in film, Christian symbols, especially allusion to the Passion with an emphasis on its ambiguous status of the body, occurs frequently. This chapter examines paintings about dying that show up in films, in what is called intermediality. What the author gleans from Jasper’s work is an attempt to overcome binary oppositions and the separations they entail. The bridge is the imagination, which compels us to take fiction seriously as a knowledge-producing field. If we take Coleridge’s definition of fiction, “the willing suspension of disbelief”, we can see that the three main words help us to be serious about guilt and responsibility, but also about liberation, the latter through the release of fantasy. It is this view of fiction that makes it possible to overcome the dichotomies that rule the world, including the one between sacred and profane. This dichotomy is explored in works of visual art about the body, and especially the dying body, by Velázquez, Grünewald, Mantegna, Zvjagintsev’s film The Return, and the film/video project Madame B by Bal and Williams Gamaker.

This chapter deals with the specific role and place of the graphic novel in the contemporary literary field. It first addresses the widely debated analogies and differences between comics and graphic novels, while making a clear plea for the autonomy of the latter. It then studies the history of the graphic novel, with a strong emphasis on questions of publication format and cultural reception. Finally, it also discusses the question of canon formation and the relationships between mainstream and minority cultures in the field.

This chapter addresses the use of technological media in contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedies that have used the form, narratives, and cultural cachet of Greek tragedy to create work that engages spectators in examinations of human culture and behavior which have deep historical and emotional resonance, even when the productions themselves are destabilising and sometimes undermining the cultural position of their ancient Greek referents. The approaches span a large gamut from the use of video as scenography to the immersion of the audience in theatrical landscapes fragmented through media. Central to the discussion are artists such the Wooster Group, Jay Scheib, John Jesurun, and Jan Fabre, who use technology to create intermedial effects that express and interrogate the relationship of media to contemporary culture and representation. These works manage to encapsulate the rapidly changing modes of discourse, both live and mediated, and the ever-increasing problematics of representation in a media-saturated world.

I posit that it is time to rethink the taxonomic, epistemological and heuristic values of the visual arts by applying magical realism as an interdisciplinary theoretical tool to analyses of cinematic narratives attempting to capture and to relay the ineffable of traumatic memories. Where the written word struggles to recreate a traumatic reality, the visual image artistically insinuates itself as reality. By applying the concept of intermediality to verbal and nonverbal forms of magical realism, the present argument foregrounds the ekphrastic synergy between word (novels and screenplays) and image (films and photographs), and between cinema (words, sounds and images) and other visual media (paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures). Events that did not register with the psyche at the time of their occurrence may be represented /recreated by the power of suggestion inherent in the magical realist image, in both its verbal and nonverbal forms, as well as in their intermedial hybrids.