The Classic Text: Traditions and Interpretations

"In what ways have such classic works as the Bible and the plays of William Shakespeare been presented to a loyal readership over the centuries? How have the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans been transmitted through the millennia, and why do they continue to hold such potency and relevance? How has the vivid imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy been depicted and interpreted from the middle ages to the present? Would Milton's Paradise Lost have entered the canon of western literature without the untiring promotional efforts of its principal publisher? Why do works such as Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin continue to hold secure positions as American literary classics? Would James Joyce's Ulysses have remained an obscure modernist novel without the censorship issues that surrounded it?

These are some of the questions addressed by a major exhibition entitled "The Classic Text: Traditions and Interpretations," that was on view in the Fourth Floor Exhibition Gallery of the Golda Meir Library from May 1996 through March 1997. This exhibit was redesigned as a Web exhibit in 1997.

The exhibition of over 130 books, manuscripts, and prints, drawn principally from the library's Special Collections, is concerned less with the literary merits of the great standard classics, than it is with the text as cultural icon, offering insight into the question of what becomes a classic most, and why."

Some of these Classics are:

1. The Bible
2. Homer
3. Aristophanes
4. Virgil
5. Ovid
6. Saint Augustine
7. Dante Alighieri
8. Geoffrey Chaucer
9. Edmund Spencer
10. William Shakespeare
11. John Milton
12. James Fenimore Cooper
13. Nathaniel Hawthorne
14. Harrier Beecher Stowe
15. James Joyce
The Classic Text: Traditions and Interpretations: Table of Contents