Rediscovering E. R. Dodds
Scholarship, Education, Poetry, and the Paranormal
Stephen Harrison editor Christopher Pelling editor Christopher Stray editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:3rd Oct '19
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Rediscovering E. R. Dodds offers the first comprehensive assessment of a remarkable classical scholar, who was also a poet with extensive links to twentieth-century English and Irish literary culture, the friend of Auden and MacNeice. Dodds was born in Northern Ireland, but made his name as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford from 1936 to 1960, succeeding Gilbert Murray. Before this he taught at Reading and Birmingham, was active in the Association of University Teachers, or AUT (of which he became president), and brought an outsider's perspective to the comfortable and introspective world of Oxford. His famous book The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) remains one of the most distinguished and visionary works of scholarship of its time, though much less well-known is his long and influential involvement with psychic research and his work for the reconstruction of German education after the Second World War. The contributions to this volume seek to shed light on these less explored areas of Dodds' life and his significance as perhaps the last classicist to play a significant role in British literary culture, as well as examining his work across different areas of scholarship, notably Greek tragedy. A group of memoirs - one by his pupil and former literary executor, Donald Russell, and three by younger friends who knew, visited, and looked after Dodds in his last years - complement this portrait of the influential scholar and poet, offering a glimpse of the man behind the legacy.
Rediscovering E.R. Dodds is an invitation to consider not only Dodds the enshrined scholar, but also Dodds the human, himself once a nobody, who lived in trying times and had to overcome many hurdles. These hurdles and his beginner's luck, panache and intellectual strategies are retraced in Stray and Pelling's first chapter. * FRANCESCA SPIEGEL, The Classical Review *
This collection of essays deserves plaudits for latitude befitting the catholicity of E.R. Dodd's concerns and achievements ... The essays in Rediscovering Dodds, exploring and celebrating his work, are a necessary reminder of this most multi-faceted of classicists. * Sean Sheehan, Classics Ireland *
The essays in Rediscovering Dodds, exploring and celebrating his work, are a necessary reminder of this most multi-faceted of classicists. * Sean Sheehan, Classics Ireland *
E. R. Dodds (1893-1979) is one of the most interesting and unusual figures of twentieth-century classical scholarship... As Stray and Pelling explain in the introduction, this volume aims both to revisit Dodds's scholarship and to show some of the ways in which the seemingly disparate, contradictory elements of his life come together into a more or less coherent unity... The volume succeeds admirably in fulfilling these two objectives. * Alexandre Johnston, University College, Oxford, Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
[The chapters] provide a wonderful contextualization, a primer for understanding Dodds, his lineage, context of his person, works and writings, and unexpected characteristics and expertise. Overarching takeaways from Dodds' work was to other timeframes, his contemporary world, our own world and his impact on psychology, anthropology, telepathy, tragedy, politics, the mystical and metaphysical. E.R. Dodds was a person of high-level complexities. * George P. Carras, Washington and Lee University, Religious Studies Review *
This book should be on the shelf of everyone who is interested in the various facets of Dodds' career. His bibliography, stretching from 1916 unto 1977, shows him to have been a very concentrated and busy man. All his reviews were perceptive, despite their narrow foci. Humane scholar that he was, E.R. Dodds will be introduced to a new generation of specialist readers in these pages, and he is well worth remembering. * Darrell Sutton, The Quarterly Review *
...a book which contains not a few chapters of compelling interest...A welcome feature is a complete bibliography of Dodd's writings. The book is produced to a high standard. * Colin Leach, Classics For All *
ISBN: 9780198777366
Dimensions: 222mm x 146mm x 27mm
Weight: 590g
368 pages