Barry Unsworth, the British Booker Prize- winning author, was, in a sense, the creative catalyst for this volume. While researching the late- twentieth- century revival of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis on international stages, Edith Hall was led from drama to fi ction by reading Unsworth’s 2002 novel, Th e Songs of the Kings . 1Unsworth’s novel pinpointed one of the major features in the revival of Euripides’ long- neglected tragedy: the prevalence of political ‘spin’ that dominated media discourse in the 1990s and in the run- up to the second Iraq War; in Unsworth’s novel, this led directly to Iphigenia’s death under the infl uence of ancient ‘spin doctors’ such as Odysseus. 2 So when Edith, together with Katie Billotte, began to plan a conference on ancient Greek myth in contemporary fi ction, Unsworth was fi rst on their list of invitees. With characteristic generosity, he accepted with enthusiasm, but fate tragically intervened and he died from cancer at the age of 82 in June 2012, just a month before the British Academy conference which gave rise to this volume. future. All the works were created in the post-Cold War era, which can be seen to infl ect their composition and their appropriation of Greek myth, and in many instances to raise questions regarding the appropriateness of gazing at historical events through a mythical lens. In his famous essay ‘Odysseus’ Scar’ (1946), Erich Auerbach remarked that recent events both before and during the Second World War underlined ‘how unfi t [historical themes] are for legend’. Yet h e c o n c e d e d t h a t t h e i r v e r y c o m p l e x i t y oft en compelled historians to resort to what he saw as the simpler, less nuanced technique of mythic storytelling. 4 Within this same context of Nazism, both Bernhard Schlink and Jonathan Littell were accused of inappropriate ‘kitsch’ in their use of myth to grapple with historical reality, as Sebastian Matzner (Chapter 10) and Edith Hall (Chapter 11) respectively show, particularly given the German literary- cultural discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘coming to terms with the past’). Yet there is also no doubt that myth can give a protective veneer to literature which opposes a repressive regime, and thus enables a critical resistance, as Helen Eastman (Chapter 14), Patrice Rankine (Chapter 1) and Margaret Reynolds (Chapter 13) all demonstrate in their contributions.