From Madeline Millers The Song of Achilles (2011) to Pat Barkers The Voyage Home (2024), there has been a huge rise in womens rewritings of ancient myths and texts in recent years. Women writers are looking back to the classical past more than ever before, and there is serious public interest in womens reworkings of the ancient world. But at the same time, this is nothing new: women have been responding to the worlds of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years, across many different time periods, and multiple cultures and languages.
This first volume in a two-volume set explores the different ways that women have retold and responded to Classics across the ages, as well as how these responses might resist or unpack the tensions inherent in notions of gender, race, canonicity, class and cultural heritagein a context in which classical education and scholarship have been confined to the ivory tower, studied by men in pursuit of an understanding of the great men of history. Looking at extraordinary women writers across thousands of years, from Sappho, Marguerite de Navarre, Lucrezia Marinella and Renée Vivien to Tayari Jones, Roz Kaveney, Zadie Smith and Anne Carson, from ancient Greece to the Venezuelan diaspora, this volume demonstrates the urgency and the centrality of women's creations in the world of Classics.
Recenzijos
From antiquity to the present and across multiple media in different European vernaculars, this wide-ranging volume brings to serious scholarly attention, often for the first time, a number of classically inspired works by both seasoned and lesser-known women writers. -- Fiona Macintosh, Emeritus Professor of Classical Reception, University of Oxford, UK Women Creating Classics: A Retrospective brings together a fabulous array of both long established and rising scholars analysing mostly feminist reinterpretations of older myths and classical literature. Particular highlights are the introduction in translation of Lena Yau's Spanish mythological retellings in poetry, by Katie Brown, and the interweaving of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe's stories as analysed by Eugenia Nicolaci. -- Anise K. Strong, Associate Professor of History, Western Michigan University, USA
Daugiau informacijos
An examination of the contribution women scholars and writers have made to the world of classical reception in literature.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction (Emily Hauser and Helena Taylor, University of Exeter, UK)
Ancient and Early Modern
1. Women Creating History (Ian Plant, Macquarie University, Australia)
2. Classical Credentials: Womens Intellectual and Sexual Licence in
Sixteenth-Century France (Emma Herdman, St. Andrews University, UK)
3. Lucrezia Marinella and Ancient Rhetoric: A Womans Approach to Eloquence,
Persuasion, and Metaphor in the Late Italian Renaissance (Francesca
DAlessandro Behr, University of Houston, USA)
Modern
4. All the Allurements of Beauty and Eloquence: Aspasia of Miletus and the
Intellectual Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Isobel Hurst, Goldsmiths
University, UK)
5. A Night in Ancient Rome: Renée Viviens Scholarly and Literary Re-Creation
of the Cult of Bona Dea (Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Lille University, France)
6. Sofiia Parnoks Sapphic Cycle Roses of Pieria: Translation and Commentary
(Georgina Barker, University College London, UK)
7. Rebels Against the Tyranny of Men: Women Performing Greek Comedy in
Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Mara Gold, University of Oxford, UK)
8. Saved with Ablatives and Declensions in the Toilet stall: Classical
Learning and the Poetry of Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) (Judith Hallett,
University of Maryland, USA)
9. To read, to see, to spin, and to turn: Reintroducing Barbara Köhlers
Elektras (Lena Grimm, University of Michigan, USA)
Contemporary
10. How to Be the Best: Madeline Miller's Patroclus (Jessica Lawrence,
University of Cambridge, UK)
11. Voices of Recovery in Josephine Balmers The Paths of Survival (Sheila
Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania, USA)
12. Wrongful Conviction: Odyssean Possibilities in Tayari Jones An American
Marriage (Justine McConnell, Kings College London, UK)
13. Animating Disability Arts and Ovidian Metamorphosis in Kinetic Lights
DESCENT (Amanda Kubic, The University of Michigan, USA)
14. Passim Clouds: Helen, Marilyn and Norma Jean Baker of Troy (Eugenia
Nicolaci, University of Bristol, UK)
15. Eating the Classics: Culinary rewritings of classical myths in poems by
Lena Yau (Katie Brown, University of Exeter, UK)
16. The Ovidian influence on Zadie Smith (Tracey Walters, Stony Brook
University, USA)
17. A Contemporary Medea: Alice Diop's Saint Omer (2022) (Fiona Cox,
University of Exeter, UK)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Emily Hauser is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of Mythica: A New History of Homers World, Through the Women Written Out of It (2025), How Women Became Poets (2023) and For the Most Beautiful (2016). She is co-editor of Reading Poetry, Writing Genre (2018).
Helena Taylor is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (2024) and The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture (2017). She is co-editor of Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (2023) and Women and Querelles in Early Modern France (2021).
