C494: The Making of the Classical

Reception and Aesthetics in the Ancient World

 

The following resources were covered in the library sessions in Fall 2011, and are recommended to students of this course.

 

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

 

General:

 

Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth, eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Call number: DE5 .O9 2003 (Reference Dept.)

Also available online

 

Oxford Reference Online: Includes several concise reference works of interest to classicists, including The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, and Who's Who in the Ancient World

 

Specialized:

 

Cancik, Hubert, and Helmuth Schneider, eds. Brills New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. Leiden: Brill, 2002-

Call number: DE5 .N4813 2002 (Reference Dept.)

 

Grafton, Anthony, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.

Call number: DE60 .C55 2010 (Reference Dept.)

 

IUCAT

 

IUCAT includes books, periodicals (newspapers, magazines, journals), and dissertations. You cannot use it to find articles in journals.

 

When your search words are quite specific and unique (e.g. 'presocratics'), a keyword search may work well enough. However, it is often better to search the library catalog in a more structured way using the 'Browse by Subject' option. To do this, choose 'Begins With (Browse)' on the Basic Search page, then type your search words into the box and hit 'subject.' Try this using the following terms, for example:

 

Trojan War

Epic poetry, Greek

Poets, Greek 

Homer

 

You should see a list of subject headings relating to these topics. You can scroll backwards and forwards through the list. When you click on a particular subject heading, you will be taken to a list of books that are considered most relevant to the subject you have chosen.  

 

Databases

 

To find articles in scholarly journals, you will need to search one or more of the following databases. 

 

The most important, discipline-specific database for classicists is L'Année philologique, which includes articles, books, and essays in books from 1969 to the present. When searching for secondary literature published very recently, you may find that TOCS-IN is a useful supplement to L'Année philologique.

 

Remember that neither of these databases includes the full text of journal articles. You will need to record the citation information so that you can use Find Articles to look for full text.

 

If your research topic is inter- or multi-disciplinary, you should also try searching the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (part of Web of Knowledge), which indexes journal articles in all arts and humanities subjects from 1975 to the present. The MLA International Bibliography is another important multi-disciplinary database for research in literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. Both of these databases provide links to the full text of journal articles when it is available.    

 

If your research topic is art-historical, you should try searching the Bibliography of the History of Art for articles and books published before 2008. To find more recent secondary materials, use the International Bibliography of Art. ARTstor is an image database that might help you identify an art-historical topic.

 

Internet Resources

 

In the final library session in Fall 2011, you were introduced to the following projects:

 

Perseus Digital Library: Despite some problems with access speed, this is the most important digital library of texts and images for classicists

 

Homer Multitext Project: Intended as a definitive Web edition of the Homeric and related texts, this site also includes supporting secondary materials

 

Stoa Consortium: Home to several important digital projects for classicists, including Demos (a digital encyclopedia of Athenian political life in the 5th and 4th centuries BC) and Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World (which includes course materials from academic institutions worldwide)

 

These are scholarly digital projects which emanate from academic institutions and were created by experts in the field.

 

Most Internet information, however, is unfiltered, and it is therefore particularly important to evaluate it carefully for trustworthiness and quality. For any site you encounter, you should be able to identify and assess the following elements:

 

Author or contact person

Institution/affiliation

Date of creation and revision

Intended audience

Purpose: to inform, explain, or persuade

 

More information on how to evaluate web sites can be found here.  

 

MLA Citation Style (examples)

 

Books by one or more authors:

 

Hall, Edith. The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's 'Odyssey.' Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008.

 

Hall, Edith, and Fiona Macintosh. Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660-1914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

 

Edited volumes, anthologies etc.:

 

Bloom, Harold, ed. Aeschylus: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Broomall: Chelsea House, 2002.

 

Articles:

 

Revermann, Martin. "The Competence of Theatre Audiences in Fifth- and Fourth-Century Athens." Journal of Hellenic Studies 126 (2009): 99-124.

 

Essays in books:

 

Porter, James I. "Feeling Classical: Classicism and Ancient Literary Criticism." Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome. Ed. James I. Porter. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 301-352.

 

More information on citing in MLA Style can be found here.