Women Creating Classics

A Retrospective

Emily Hauser, Helena Taylor

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350444393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• ANCIENT AND EARLY MODERN
• 1 Women Creating History
• 2 Classical Credentials: Women’s Intellectual and Sexual Licence in Sixteenth-Century France
• 3 Lucrezia Marinella and Ancient Rhetoric: A Woman’s Approach to Eloquence, Persuasion and Metaphor in the Late Italian Renaissance
• MODERN
• 4 ‘All the Allurements of Beauty and Eloquence’: Aspasia of Miletus and the Intellectual Woman in the Nineteenth Century
• 5 A Night in Ancient Rome: Renée Vivien’s Scholarly and Literary Re-Creation of the Cult of Bona Dea
• 6 Sofiia Parnok’s Sapphic Cycle Roses of Pieria: Translation and Commentary
• 7 ‘Rebels Against the Tyranny of Men’: The Birds, The Bees and Agitation for Degrees at Girton College 1898–1948
• 8 ‘Saved with Ablatives and Declensions in the Toilet Stall’: Classical Learning and the Poetry of Maxine Kumin (1925–2014)
• 9 ‘To Read, to See, to Spin, and to Turn’: Reintroducing Barbara Köhler’s Elektras
• CONTEMPORARY
• 10 How to Be the Best: Madeline Miller’s Patroclus
• 11 Voices of Recovery in Josephine Balmer’s The Paths of Survival
• 12 Wrongful Conviction: Odyssean Possibilities in Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage
• 13 Animating Disability Arts and Ovidian Metamorphosis in Kinetic Light’s DESCENT
• 14 Passim Clouds: Helen, Marilyn and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy
• 15 Eating the Classics: Culinary Rewritings of Classical Myths in Poems by Lena Yau
• 16 The Ovidian Influence on Zadie Smith
• 17 A Contemporary Medea: Alice Diop’s St Omer (2022)
• References
• Index
• Copyright