DIVYA NAIR

Classical Reception and the Problem of Antiquity in Early Modern English Literature explores early modern engagements with antiquity as a dynamic and dissonant inheritance, mediated through contemporary interpretations of ancient literary forms and cultural norms. I argue that classical reception in early modern England was a protean, polyphonic, and kaleidoscopic cultural process animated by a pervasive tension between the canonical and the vernacular. Early modern English receptions of antiquity were creative reimaginings—hybrid reconstructions of the ancient human past shaped by post-medieval multilingualism, literary forn, theological friction, ethnographic observations, and natural scientific curiosities.