McKinsey (English, U. of New Hampshire) explores how the post-Enlightenment idea of ancient Greece was received by three non-English subjects of the British Empire, whose national identities and personal histories put them at odds with the prevailing narrative of British ascendancy that Victorian Hellenism had served to sponsor. The three poets--Irish W. B. Yeats, Egyptian C. P. Cavafy, and West Indian Derek Walcott--stood in different relations to metropolitan British culture and its proprietary vision of ancient Greece, he says, yet shared qualities in the angle of their vision and creative response. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
