In “Homer’s Daughter: Graves’s Vera Historia ”, Sheila Murnaghan finds Graves in a mode both inquisitive and playful. Adopting a different approach, Kennedy and O’Gorman explore how Graves’s reanimation of Claudius constitutes a “fantasy of the recovery of the past” (51), as though the fiction of an emperor’s autobiography might make complete the always unfinished project of history.ĭespite Graves’s misgivings about the literary value of his novels, the essays in this section share the view that in his historical fiction Graves was able to work through and dramatize his distinctive ideas about the past. Bennett’s essay argues that, far from satisfying our need for historiographical probity in reading historical fiction, “Graves’s attempt to ground the novels in historical factuality… may be seen to work against their force as novels” (37).

In the preface to Claudius the God, for example, Graves rails against critics who attacked his historical research in his previous book, and submits a long list of ancient sources he claims to have consulted. The first two essays, “‘It’s readable all right, but it’s not history’: Robert Graves’s Claudius novels and the Impossibility of Historical Fiction” by Andrew Bennett and “Claudius in the Library” by Duncan Kennedy and Ellen O’Gorman, discuss the Claudius novels (1935’s I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the God, published a year later) and the vexed status of history in Graves’s historical fiction.

Following Gibson’s introduction, the first five essays treat Graves’s historical fiction. Given the tremendous variety of Graves’s literary corpus, Gibson has sensibly pursued a fairly clear division of essays according to the genres in which Graves worked. The wide range of essays covers almost every aspect of Graves’s prodigious literary career, and allows the contradictions of his persona to emerge in full: the author steeped in classical learning whose fierce iconoclasm frequently provoked antipathy or indifference from the academic community the celebrated writer of historical fiction, who, in his quasi-religious devotion to poetry, regarded his novels as mere money-spinning “potboilers” (e.g.

Gibson, seeks “to energize the debate about the value of contribution” (5) to modern reception of the ancient world. Andrews and published as part of OUP’s “Classical Presences” series, the volume, in the words of its editor A. Arising out of a 2009 conference held at the University of St. While Graves is already the subject of several edited volumes, 1 the current volume is the first to be devoted exclusively to this aspect of Graves’s work. The influence of the poet, novelist, mythographer, and translator Robert Graves on the reception of classics in the 20th century is staggering.

I claudius graves