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Henry Stead
University of St Andrews, Classics, Faculty Member
- I am a Lecturer in Latin at the University of St Andrews. From 2016 to 2019 I was a Leverhulme Early Career Research ... moreI am a Lecturer in Latin at the University of St Andrews. From 2016 to 2019 I was a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Open University. My project, 'Brave New Classics', which is ongoing, explores the intellectual repercussions of the Russian Revolution for British culture until 1956 through the lens of engagements with the Greek and Roman classics. Before joining Open (May 2016) I was the Post-doctoral Research Associate at King's College London, working with Prof. Edith Hall on the AHRC-funded project 'Classics and Class in Britain (1789-1939)'. My doctoral research looked at the reception of Catullus in the Romantic era. I held the Michael Comber Studentship for Classical Reception at Open and Oxford Universities (2008-2011). In 2012 I researched for a spell for APGRD, Oxford, on the Performing Epic project, taught Latin for Oxford's 'Latin Teaching Scheme' at a couple of local state schools, tutored a bit on the Classical Reception module at Oxford. I am also the director of the cross-media poetry platform, London Poetry Systems.edit
A scan of an article for Argo: A Hellenic Review (issue 6, Autumn/Winter 2017, pp24-26) about the poet Tony Harrison.
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... in Movrin & Olechowska eds. (2016), Classics and Class: Greek and Latin Classics and Communism at School (Warsaw/Ljubljana) pp 3-31.
The Paper uploaded here is a pre-print version.
The Paper uploaded here is a pre-print version.
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Pre-print version from book printed by Bloomsbury, 2015.
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Review: Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own, Picador. 128pp. ISBN: 978-1447241218
Pre-print edition of review in Argo (2015) Daisy Dunn ed.
(London: Bell & Bain) 1.32-33
Pre-print edition of review in Argo (2015) Daisy Dunn ed.
(London: Bell & Bain) 1.32-33
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Catullus, one of the most Hellenizing, scandalous, and emotionally expressive of the Roman poets, burst onto the British cultural scene during the Romantic era. It was not until this socially, politically, and culturally explosive epoch,... more
Catullus, one of the most Hellenizing, scandalous, and emotionally expressive of the Roman poets, burst onto the British cultural scene during the Romantic era. It was not until this socially, politically, and culturally explosive epoch, with its mania for all things Greek, that Catullus' work was first fully translated into English and played a key role in the countercultural and commercially driven classicism of the time. Previously marginalized on the traditional eighteenth-century curriculum as a charming but debauched minor love poet, Catullus was discovered as a major poetic voice in the late Georgian era by reformist emulators—especially in the so-called Cockney School—and won widespread respect. In this volume, Stead pioneers a new way of understanding the key role Catullus played in shaping Romanticism by examining major literary engagements with Catullus, from John Nott of Bristol's pioneering book-length bilingual edition (1795), to George Lamb's polished verse translation (1821). He identifies the influence of Catullus' poetry in the work of numerous Romantic-era literary and political figures, including Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hunt, Canning, Brougham, and Gifford, demonstrating the degree of its cultural penetration.
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How did classical authors and ideas inform reform in Britain 1789-1960s?
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Pre-print: Review of Amanda Wrigley's book: WRIGLEY, A . (2015) Greece on Air. Engagements with Ancient Greece on BBC Radio, 1920s–1960s. Pp. xxii + 328, ills. Oxford: Oxford University Press. £80, US$150. ISBN: 978-0-19-964478-0. doi:... more
Pre-print: Review of Amanda Wrigley's book:
WRIGLEY, A . (2015) Greece on Air. Engagements with Ancient Greece on
BBC Radio, 1920s–1960s. Pp. xxii + 328, ills. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. £80, US$150. ISBN: 978-0-19-964478-0.
doi: 10.1017/S0009840X16002304
Link to review:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-review/article/ancient-greece-on-radio-wrigley-a-greece-on-air-engagements-with-ancient-greece-on-bbc-radio-1920s1960s-pp-xxii-328-ills-oxford-oxford-university-press-2015-cased-80-us150-isbn-978-0-19-964478-0/5B7D73B363E9A9BE404A41CA8E4C689D
WRIGLEY, A . (2015) Greece on Air. Engagements with Ancient Greece on
BBC Radio, 1920s–1960s. Pp. xxii + 328, ills. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. £80, US$150. ISBN: 978-0-19-964478-0.
doi: 10.1017/S0009840X16002304
Link to review:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-review/article/ancient-greece-on-radio-wrigley-a-greece-on-air-engagements-with-ancient-greece-on-bbc-radio-1920s1960s-pp-xxii-328-ills-oxford-oxford-university-press-2015-cased-80-us150-isbn-978-0-19-964478-0/5B7D73B363E9A9BE404A41CA8E4C689D
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Research Interests: Psychology and Routledge
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Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform presents an original and carefully argued case for the importance of classical ideas, education and self-education in the personal development and activities of British... more
Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform presents an original and carefully argued case for the importance of classical ideas, education and self-education in the personal development and activities of British social reformers in the 19th and first six decades of the 20th century. Usually drawn from the lower echelons of the middle class and the most aspirational artisanal and working-class circles, the prominent reformers, revolutionaries, feminists and educationalists of this era, far from regarding education in Latin and Greek as the preserve of the upper classes and inherently reactionary, were consistently inspired by the Mediterranean Classics and contested the monopoly on access to them often claimed by the wealthy and aristocratic elite. The essays, several of which draw on previously neglected and unpublished sources, cover literary figures (Coleridge, the 'Cockney Classicist' poets including Keats, and Dickens), different cultural media (burlesque theatre, body-building, banner art, poetry, journalism and fiction), topics in social reform (the desirability of revolution, suffrage, poverty, social exclusion, women's rights, healthcare, eugenics, town planning, race relations and workers' education), as well as political affiliations and agencies (Chartists, Trade Unions, the WEA, political parties including the Fabians, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Labour Party). The sixteen essays in this volume restore to the history of British Classics some of the subject's ideological complexity and instrumentality in social progress, a past which is badly needed in the current debates over the future of the discipline. Contributors include specialists in English Literature, History, Classics and Art.</p
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Review by Henry Stead (King’s College London) of David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, eds., The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 3: 1660-1790 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 700. £147. ISBN... more
Review by Henry Stead (King’s College London) of David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, eds., The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 3: 1660-1790 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 700. £147. ISBN 9780199219810.
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The relationship between the study of Greek and Roman classics and European communism, particularly in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, has attracted increasing critical attention over the past decade. The international workshop in which the... more
The relationship between the study of Greek and Roman classics and European communism, particularly in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, has attracted increasing critical attention over the past decade. The international workshop in which the following articles were initially presented as papers was held online in October 2021. Hosted by the School of Classics, University of St. Andrews, and sponsored by the Classical Reception Studies Network, it aimed to explore further the conflicted and complex relationship between classics and communism, using the prism of the ambiguous or polysemic concept of proletarianism. What, after all, is “a proletarian classics”?
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The relationship between the study of Greek and Roman classics and European communism, particularly in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, has attracted increasing critical attention over the past decade. There have been several international... more
The relationship between the study of Greek and Roman classics and European communism, particularly in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, has attracted increasing critical attention over the past decade. There have been several international conferences organized by scholars, including my coeditors David Movrin and Elżbieta Olechowska, which have resulted in the volumes Classics and Communism (2013) and Classics and Class (2016). More recently, ancient theater and (mainly) Soviet communism in Central and Eastern Europe has been the subject of an international conference, resulting in a third volume, Classics and Communism in Theatre (2019). The subject is gaining momentum.
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Co-edited volume about progressive uses of classical culture in Britain 1789-1969
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From Oxford University Press's ‘Classical Presences’ series, Carol Dougherty's Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature places Homer's Odyssey in dialogue with five twentieth- and twenty-first-century... more
From Oxford University Press's ‘Classical Presences’ series, Carol Dougherty's Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature places Homer's Odyssey in dialogue with five twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels which all deal in some way with the ideas of home or travel. The author focuses on novels which, on the whole, do not respond overtly to the Odyssey, but which instead share key themes – such as transience, reunion, nostalgia, or family relationships – with the Homeric poem. The conversations which she initiates between the ancient epic and the modern novels inspire us to rethink previously held assumptions about the Odyssey. For example, Dougherty's exploration of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), in which a veteran returns from the First World War with no memory of his wife, prompts her reader to consider Odysseus’ stay with Calypso as ‘a kind of nostalgic amnesia, a necessary break that enables rather than an obstac...
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As the editors of Once and Future Antiquities point out in their preface, ‘science fiction, fantasy, and the classics have in common the effect of inviting us to reconsider (by speculating, by imagining, by contextualizing) our own world... more
As the editors of Once and Future Antiquities point out in their preface, ‘science fiction, fantasy, and the classics have in common the effect of inviting us to reconsider (by speculating, by imagining, by contextualizing) our own world anew’ (xi). The fourteen wide-ranging chapters in this volume eloquently illustrate this point. Contributors explore the multiple ways in which the genres of science fiction and fantasy (SF&F) engage with, respond to, and cast new light on cultural artefacts, story patterns, and characters from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, reflecting too on how these receptions respond to contemporary preoccupations. Appropriately for a volume on classical receptions, the contributions are all linked by the unifying theme of ‘displacements’ – a concept which refers here both to the movement of ideas, texts, and themes across time and space, and to the disruption of perceived genre boundaries or preconceived ideas about the relationship between receiving and s...
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meant that, for many boys, the study of Latin and Greek represented little more than purposeless misery. So a successful pupil like Sydney Smith, highly adept at Greek and Latin verse composition, ‘even in old age’ (so his daughter, Lady... more
meant that, for many boys, the study of Latin and Greek represented little more than purposeless misery. So a successful pupil like Sydney Smith, highly adept at Greek and Latin verse composition, ‘even in old age’ (so his daughter, Lady Saba Holland, testifies) ‘used to shudder at the recollection of Winchester, and I have heard him speak with horror of the misery of the years he spent there’. Such recollections are not swept under the carpet, nor does A. resile either from revealing the questioning by many of the gains for most pupils in being subjected to a course of study that had no bearing on their future lives (a questioning trenchantly articulated by John Locke in a passage quoted from Some Thoughts Concerning Education) or from exposing the growing perception of a Classical education as primarily a provider of social status and of elevation (in Dean Gainsford’s notorious words) ‘above the vulgar herd’. Fortunately, the story does not end with such negativity. In the book’s penultimate chapter, ‘Classics Renewed’, the reader is first introduced to Samuel Parr, assistant master at Harrow, who in 1771 set up his own school at Stanmore. A brilliant teacher, he is seen as the harbinger of a new emphasis on teaching Greek in its own right, an emphasis whose traction was set to increase with the growth in the public appeal of Hellenism in the nineteenth century. The reinvention, however, of classical teaching, and its reform along lines which we can recognise as providing the matrix for the humane academic discipline that continues (in the face of all educational caprices) to flourish, are primarily thanks to two schools and three of their nineteenth-century headmasters: Samuel Butler and Benjamin Hall Kennedy at Shrewsbury, and Thomas Arnold at Rugby. Although Charles Darwin did not look back to his time at Shrewsbury quite as fondly as A. perhaps implies (in his ‘Recollections’ Darwin says that, for all his admiration for Horace, the ‘strictly classical’ diet under Butler meant that ‘[t]he school as a means of education to me was simply a blank’), the innovations wrought by these three were to transform the teaching of Greek and Latin, and attitudes towards them, for generations to come. This readable volume is a most welcome addition to the growing number of studies of the history of Classical reception. With specific regard to Classical education, it builds on the work of important predecessors like J. Simon and M.L. Clarke, and takes its place nobly alongside more recent studies such as F. Waquet’s Latin, or the Empire of a Sign (2001) and C. Stray’s Classics Transformed (1998).