#000119
The Guernica Bull: Studies in the Classical Tradition in the Twentieth Century
Harry C. Rutledge
How did the myths and forms of Greece and Rome survive into the disenchanted twentieth century? In *The Guernica Bull*, the classicist Harry C. Rutledge tracks the classical tradition through modern literature, art, and drama—from echoes of Plato in Thomas Mann's *Death in Venice* to Marguerite Yourcenar's reworking of ancient legend—and finds its most potent modern expression in the bull of Picasso's *Guernica*, at once violence and creative force. Published by the University of Georgia Press in 1989, it's a graceful set of scholarly essays by a teacher clearly in love with his material. Rutledge writes for the cultivated general reader, not just fellow specialists. For anyone curious about how antiquity keeps resurfacing in modern art and letters, it's an elegant, wide-ranging guide to the persistence of the classical.
more…less ▴
The author
Harry C. Rutledge (1930–2001) was a beloved professor of classics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he taught for nearly three decades. He specialized in the survival of Greek and Roman themes in later culture, and this book distills that lifelong interest.
The book
The Guernica Bull: Studies in the Classical Tradition in the Twentieth Century, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1989, is a collection of essays examining classical motifs across modern literature, drama, and art. Its title and organizing image come from Picasso's Guernica, where Rutledge reads the bull as a fusion of destruction and artistic potency.
How it reads
The essays are erudite but accessible, more appreciation than polemic, and they range confidently from Mann and Yourcenar to modern painting. As a survey of the classical tradition's modern afterlife it holds up as a thoughtful, humane introduction.
For more context
The book joins a rich scholarly conversation about 'the classical tradition,' the study of how antiquity is continually reinterpreted by later ages.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Harry C. Rutledge
- Publisher
- University of Georgia Press
- Place of publication
- Athens, Georgia
- Year
- 1989
- ISBN
- 0-8203-1064-6
- Shelf
- Essays
- Location
- Maine