Women Creating Classics
A Retrospective
Women Creating Classics
A Retrospective
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Description
From Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles (2012) to Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships (2019), there has been a huge rise in women's literary receptions of classics in recent years. Women writers are looking back to the classical past more than ever before, and there is serious public interest in women's responses to the ancient world. But at the same time, this is nothing new: women have been receiving classics for hundreds of years, across many different time periods, and multiple cultures.
This first volume in a two-volume set explores the different ways that woman have retold and responded to classics, as well as how these responses might resist or unpack the tensions inherent in notions of gender, race, canonicity, class and cultural heritage. This is of particular significance when we consider that classical education and scholarship has 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 such as Sappho, Lucrezia Marinella and Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison, Roz Kaveney and Zadie Smith, this volumes demonstrates centrality of women's creations in the world of classics.
Table of Contents
Introduction (Emily Hauser and Helena Taylor, University of Exeter, UK)
1. Women Creating History (Ian Plant, Macquarie University, Australia)
2. Classical Credentials: Women's Intellectual/Sexual Licence in Sixteenth-Century France (Emma Herdman, St. Andrews University, UK)
3. A Troubling Exemplar: Early Modern Responses to Lucretia (Rebecca Langlands, University of Exeter, UK; Emma Herdman, St. Andrews University, UK; Helena Taylor, University of Exeter, UK)
4. Lucrezia Marinella and Ancient Rhetoric: A Woman's Approach to Eloquence, Persuasion, and Metaphor in the Late Italian Renaissance (Francesca D'Alessandro Behr, University of Houston, USA)
5. 'All the Allurements of Beauty and Eloquence': Aspasia of Miletus and the Intellectual Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Isobel Hurst, Goldsmiths University, UK)
6. A Night in Ancient Rome: Renée Vivien's Scholarly and Literary Re-Creation of the Cult of Bona Dea (Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Lille University, France)
7. Sofiia Parnok's Sapphic Cycle Roses of Pieria: Translation and Commentary (Georgina Barker, UCL, UK)
8. 'Rebels Against the Tyranny of Men': Women Performing Greek Comedy in Early Twentieth Century Britain (Mara Gold, University of Oxford, UK)
9. Virginia Woolf's New Lysistrata (Polly Stoker, University of Winchester, UK)
10. 'Saved with Ablatives and Declensions in the Toilet stall': Classical Learning and the Poetry of Maxine Winokur Kumin (1925-2014) (Judith Hallett, University of Maryland, USA)
11. On Fran Ross' Oreo (1974) (Justine McConnell, King's College London, UK)
12. Figuring and Refiguring Penelope (Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania, USA; Isobel Hurst, Goldsmiths University, UK; Emily Hauser, University of Exeter, UK)
13. On Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) (Olabisi Obamakin, University of Exeter, UK)
14. Reflecting on Barbara Köhler's Elektra: Mirrorings (Lena Grimm, University of Michigan, USA)
15. Latin American Receptions of Antigone (Moira Fradinger, Yale University, USA)
16. Madeline Miller: The Kindness in Homer (Jennifer Lawrence, University of Cambridge, UK)
17. Voices of Recovery in Josephine Balmer's The Paths of Survival (Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania, USA)
18. On Roz Kaveney's Catullus (Jennifer Ingleheart, Durham University, UK)
19. Ovidian Metamorphosis and Disability Aesthetics in Kinetic Light's Descent (Amanda Kubic, University of Michigan, USA)
20. Passim Clouds: From Helen to Norma Jean Baker of Troy (Evgenia Nicolaci, University of Bristol, UK)
21. On Zadie Smith's The Wife of Willesden (2021) (Tracey Walters, Stony Brook University, USA)
22. On Alice Diop/Marie Ndiaye's Saint Omer (2022) (Fiona Cox, University of Exeter, UK)
23. On Stephanie McCarter's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (2022) (Helena Taylor, University of Exeter, UK and Jinyu Liu, DePauw University, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | Jul 10 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 288 |
| ISBN | 9781350444379 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Dimensions | 234 x 156 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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