AustLit

Through the lens of early modern attitudes to translation - the 'carrying over' of elements of extant texts - this course investigates the ways in which authors make 'old' texts active in 'new' texts. David Malouf's Ransom, Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, Christopher Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus will be studied in conjunction with 1) extracts from the classical texts on which these writers draw: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses 2) selected theoretical writings about imitatio and related terms, 3) key terms in the practice of literary imitation and allusion (e.g. characterisation, genre, intertext), and 4) elements of contemporary literary theory (e.g. postcolonialism, feminism, intertextuality). The course is particularly well suited to students who have studied Shakespeare, and to those wishing to study the Advanced level course Adaptation.