Vol.:(0123456789) International Journal of the Classical Tradition https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00506-6 1 3 BOOK REVIEW Reading Late Antiquity, ed. Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed and Mats Malm, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2018, pp. 267, ISBN 9783825367879, €48 Victoria Moul 1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 This is an engaging, wide-ranging and largely well-written collection of essays, which explores the relationship between the literature of late antiquity and the lit- erature and philosophy of (mostly) modernity through a strikingly large number of perspectives and methodologies. While some chapters, especially in the central sec- tion of the collection, analyse a single text in considerable depth, others ofer a much broader account, such as Ad Putter’s highly efective piece tracing the infuence of late antique biblical epic for the literature of the medieval period (‘Versifcations of the Book of Jonah: Late Antique to Late Medieval’). Despite the rather vague stated remit to emphasize the ‘tendency [of late antiquity] to slip in and out of West- ern consciousness’, and a chronological coverage from late antiquity to the present, the collection has real coherence and many chapters illuminate others: for instance, Jesús Hernández Lobato’s discussion of the links between Derrida, Lyotard and Augustine’s Confessions (in Chapter 3, ‘Late Antique Foundations of Postmodern Theory: A Critical Overview) is enhanced by proximity to Catherine Conybeare’s thoughtful speculative essay, the last in the volume, on Augustine and Edward Said (‘Mundus totus exsilium est: On Being out of Place’). On the whole Sections I (‘Theoretical Outlooks’, three chapters) and III (‘Con- tinuities and Transformation’, four chapters) are the strongest. Several of the pieces in Section II (‘Decadence and Decline’, six chapters), such as Henriette Harich- Schwarzbauer’s essay on Alma Johanna Koenig’s 1922 novel Der heilige Palast and Chiara O. Tommasi on the opera La Fiamma, though engaging case stud- ies of individual works, do not give much sense of their wider signifcance to the feld. Essays of this sort would be more efective in a more tightly focused collec- tion – say, on late antiquity and music, or late antiquity and the modern novel. One catches glimpses of several possible subsidiary studies of this sort: the chapter on Husymans (Scott McGill, ‘Reading Against the Grain: Late Latin Literature in Huysmans’ À Rebours’), for example, has several points of contact with the pieces * Victoria Moul victoria.moul@kcl.ac.uk; v.moul@ucl.ac.uk 1 King’s College London, London, UK