Women Creating Classics: A Retrospective: Emily Hauser: Bloomsbury Academic

Women Creating Classics

A Retrospective

Women Creating Classics

A Retrospective

Description

From Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles (2011) to Pat Barker's The Voyage Home (2024), there has been a huge rise in women's 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 women's 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 heritage-in 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.

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: Women's Intellectual and Sexual Licence in Sixteenth-Century France (Emma Herdman, St. Andrews University, UK)
3. 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)

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 Vivien's Scholarly and Literary Re-Creation of the Cult of Bona Dea (Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Lille University, France)
6. Sofiia Parnok's 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 Köhler's 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 Balmer's The Paths of Survival (Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania, USA)
12. Wrongful Conviction: Odyssean Possibilities in Tayari Jones' An American Marriage (Justine McConnell, King's College London, UK)
13. Animating Disability Arts and Ovidian Metamorphosis in Kinetic Light's 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

Product details

Published	07 Aug 2025
Format	Paperback
Edition	1st
Extent	304
ISBN	9781350444362
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations	10 bw illus.
Dimensions	234 x 156 mm
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

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