THE CLASSICAL HERO AND MASS MEDIA: The Hero Reloaded. The Reinvention of the Classical Hero in Contemporary Mass Media. (IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 23.) Pp. xiv + 160, colour ills. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2020. Cased, €90, US$135. ISBN: 978-90-272-0495-0

In doing so, the volume positions itself within a larger movement in Classics that considers the reception of antiquity in popular culture as a subject of serious study and an essential part of democratising a field that has long been the preserve of the elite. [...]the book's appearance marks an important step forward in the broader recognition of the importance of such studies, as the volume represents one of the first book-length treatments of the subject (cf. Martín Rodríguez examines the film's reception of various ancient accounts of Hercules’ life and traces how his character is shaped by the generic conventions of mythically-themed films, superhero narratives and Disney films. [...]Martín Rodríguez shows the influence of this newly constituted Hercules on heroes in other popular franchises including Harry Potter. The writing in the contributions is highly variable, with a number of authors displaying a tendency for overlong sentences with unclear referents (e.g. ‘Third, in each work analyzed here, the aim is a sense of total presence on the scene, of proximity to the object described, but the very excess and artificiality of what is narrated exposes the truth of its artistic nature, its non-reality, with its exhibition of literary mechanisms’ [p. 125]). [...]the volume is rife with mistakes that go beyond simple stylistic infelicities – the confusion of the possessive with the plural is rampant throughout as are missing articles and incorrect capitalisation.