Description: Brill's Companion to Classics in the Early Americas illuminates the remarkable range of Greco-Roman classical receptions across the western hemisphere from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. Bringing together fifteen essays by scholars working at the intersection of Classics and all aspects of Americanist studies, this unique collection examines how Hispanophone, Lusophone, Anglophone, Francophone, and/or Indigenous individuals engaged with Greco-Roman literary cultures and materials. By coming at the matter from a multilingual transhemispheric perspective, it disrupts prevailing accounts of classical reception in the Americas which have typically privileged North over South, Anglophone over non-Anglophone, and the cultural production of hegemonic groups over that of more marginalized others. Instead it offers a fresh account of how Greco-Roman literatures and ideas were in play from Canada to the Southern Cone to the Caribbean, treating classical reception in the early Americas as a dynamic, polyvocal phenomenon which is truly transhemispheric in reach.
Review Quotes: ''This new collection assembles fourteen essays focussing on how European classical learning was transmitted, resisted, and transformed in Ibero-American, Caribbean, American and Canadian areas between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries ... The collection is directed at advanced students and scholars working in the relevant cultural areas, and at classicists everywhere. Editor Maya Feile Tomes seeks to illuminate both the centring of an elite culture in New World writing and academic curricula, and the radical decentring it underwent.'' Germaine Warkentin, in BMCR 2022.07.19