Ancient worlds in film and television : gender and politics / edited by Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon -- Ben-Hur and Gladiator: Manifest Destiny and the Contradictions of American Empire / Jon Solomon -- Muscles and Morals: Spartacus, Ancient Hero of Modern Times / Thomas Späth and Margrit Tröhler -- With Your Shield or On It: The Gender of Heroism in Zack Snyder's 300 and Rudoph Maté's The 300 Spartans / Thorsten Beigel -- "This is Sparta!": Discourse, Gender, and the Orient in Zack Snyder's 300 / Jeroen Lauwers , Marieke Dhont and Xanne Huybrecht -- "Everybook-body Loves a Muscle Boi": Homos, Heroes, and Foes in Post-9/11 Spoofs of the 300 Spartans / Ralph J. Poole -- The Womanizing of Mark Antony: Virile Ruthlessness and Redemptive Cross-Dressing in Rome, Season Two / Margaret M. Toscano -- Cleopatra's Venus / Elisabeth Bronfen -- Over His Dead Body: Male Friendship in Homer's Iliad and Wolfgang Petersen's Troy (2004) / Andreas Krass -- Models of Masculinities in Troy: Achilles, Hector and Their Female Partners / Celina Proch and Michael Kleu -- "Include me out" - Odysseus on the Margins of European Genre Cinema: Le Mépris, Ulisse, L'Odissea / Christian Pischel -- Between Mythical and Rational Worlds: Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini / Lada Stevanović -- "Universal's Religious Bigotry Against Hinduism": Gender Norms and Hindu Authority in the Global Media Debate on Representing the Hindu God Krishna in Xena: Warrior Princess / Xenia Zeiler -- Ancient Women's Cults and Rituals in Grand Narratives on Screen: From Walt Disney's Snow White to Olga Malea's Doughnuts with Honey / Svetlana Slapšak -- Pandora-Eve-Ava: Albert Lewin's Making of a "Secret Goddess" / Almut-Barbara Renger -- Phryne Paves the Way for the Wirtschaftswunder: Visions of Guilt and "Purity" Fed by Ancient Greece, Christian Narrative, and Contemporary History / Barbara Schrödl -- The New Israeli Film Beruriah: Between Rashi and Talmud, between Antiquity and Modernity, between Feminism and Religion / Tal Ilan -- Index.

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More than a century ago, filmmakers made their primary focus innovative and widely promulgated visions of antiquity, creating a profound effect on the critical, popular, and scholarly reception of antiquity. In this volume, scholars from a variety of countries and varying academic disciplines have addressed film's way of using the field of Classical Reception to investigate, contemplate, and develop hypotheses about present-day culture, society, and politics, with a particular emphasis on gender and gender roles, their relationship to one another, and how filmic constructions of masculinity and femininity shape and are shaped by interacting economic, political, and ideological practices.