Heart of Darkness follows a journey up the Congo River, but equally critiques the imperial powers back in Europe.
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In our ongoing Guide to the Classics series, we look at Heart of Darkness: the product of dark historical energies that continue to shape our contemporary world.
An ad for cotton thread drawing on the scene in Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver is tied down by Liliputians.
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Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin, follows the travails of a pubescent boy. Somehow, through the spats, crushes and rivalries of a handful of teenagers, the great questions of the human condition are broached.
Fresco showing a woman called Sappho holding writing implements from Pompeii Naples National Archaeological Museum.
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Sappho sang of desire, passion and love – mostly directed towards women. As new fragments of her work are found, a fuller picture of her is emerging, but she remains the most mysterious of ancient poets.
An illustration from a 1914 edition of Anna Karenina.
Zahar Pichugin/Shutterstock.com
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is often acclaimed as the best novel ever written. The enthralling narrative explores love and family through intertwining plot lines, with Anna and her desire at the centre.
A central convention of Greek mythological narratives called katabasis, the hero’s journey to the underworld or land of the dead.
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Journeys to the Underworld – Greek myth, film and American anxiety
The Conversation36.9 MB(download)
Our new podcast, Essays On Air, features the most beautiful writing from Australian researchers. Today, classics expert Paul Salmond explores how modern cinema directors borrow from Greek legends.
Giovanni Cavino, I primi dodici imperatori Romani (‘The first twelve Roman emperors’), plaquettes produced at Padua, c. 1550.
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Suetonius’s unforgettable tales of sex, scandal, and debauchery have ensured that his writing has played a significant role in shaping our perceptions of imperial Rome.
Virgil reads the Aeneid to Octavia and Augustus.
Angelica Kauffmann/Hermitage/Wikimedia Commons
Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid documents the founding of Rome by a Trojan hero. As with other ancient epics, our hero has to remain resolute in the face of significant divine hostility.
Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, inspired by Dante Alighieri’s vision of heaven and hell.
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The gates to hell in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy tell us to “abandon all hope, yet who enter here”. Despite its unfunny premise, ‘La Commedia’ ends well, with its protagonist Dante reaching heaven.
Odysseus and his crew escape the cyclops, as painted by Arnold Böcklin in 1896.
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The story of the Odyssey is a quintessential quest that relates to the passage through life and the importance of love, family and home. Odysseus’s adventures have influenced everyone from Batman to Bob Dylan.
The Greeks defend their ships from the Trojans in Alfred Churchill’s Story of the Iliad, 1911.
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A central idea in the Iliad - a poetic work focused on the war for Troy - is the inevitability of death. The poem held a special place in antiquity, and has resonated in the millennia since.
The fall of the Athenian army in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War in 413 BC as depicted in an 1893 illustration by J.G.Vogt.
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The Melling sisters — like Alcott’s March sisters and Austen’s Bennetts — are four girls who become women during the course of Robin Klein’s trilogy of novels. The Sky in Silver Lace is the most bittersweet of the three.
The 1998 film adaption of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp as Hunter S Thompson, introduced millions of new fans to the world of gonzo journalism.
Fear and Loathing LLC
Hunter S Thompson’s 1971 book is a torpedo ride through some of the strangest scenes in American fact, or fiction. It’s about greed, the souring of ‘60s idealism, the failings of journalism and much more.
Carl Rahl’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1852).
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The tale of a married woman who joins her lover in Paris, The Beauties and Furies is a modernist classic. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the action is concentrated in one city, but dreams are nightmarish in this city of night, not light.
One of the most famous attempted rapes in literature: the nymph Daphne turns into a tree to escape the god Apollo.
Apollo chasing Daphne, Cornelis de Vos, 1630.
There are calls for Ovid’s Metamorphoses to be taught with a trigger warning. This 15-book epic is a rollercoaster of a read, with moments of both delicious joy and abject depravity. Like much great art, it was not created to please.
Icelandic sagas are under-appreciated in the world of European literature.
Oscar Wergeland [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Family feuds, love affairs, empire writing back to the motherland - the medieval Icelandic saga have it all. Though less known than other classics of European literature they richly deserve a place among the best.