Women Re-Creating Classics

Contemporary Voices

Emily Hauser, Helena Taylor

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350445093
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: History

In the last few years, there has been a major and unmissable surge in women's retellings and re-creations of ancient myths and texts that has put women's re-creations of Classics centre-stage. Drawing together an interdisciplinary range of creative and scholarly voices, this volume asks why classical creative retellings by women are so popular now-and considers what creativity can do to foster new ways of thinking and writing about Classics, thus blurring the boundary between the creative and the critical. Contributors engage with debates on how to make Classics more accessible through the medium of creative works, so that it is not just a discipline for the select few.

This second volume in a two-volume set brings together original creative work by some of the many women writers who are pushing forward changes in the landscape of re-creating Classics, from Madeline Miller to Jennifer Saint, Emily Hauser, Caroline Lawrence, Roz Kaveney, Nikita Gill, Fiona Benson, Anne Carson and many more. These are set alongside discussions and interviews between writers and academics, roundtable conversations among poets and critics, and reflections on creative and inclusive pedagogy-thus offering a cutting-edge collaboration between practitioners and researchers, and underlining the centrality of women's re-creations of Classics to the contemporary shaping of the field.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• CREATIVE VOICES
• 1 Rewriting Greek Myth as a Woman
• 2 Classics and Craft
• 3 Return to the Labyrinth: Retelling the Stories of Mythical Women in Contemporary Poetry
• 4 Eurydice
• 5 Only Hope Remained
• 6 In the Bad Times
• 7 The Homeric Hymn to Dionysus
• 8 Stage Manager’s Notes
• 9 Exit Kassandra (Excerpt)
• 10 a vespere nomen: An Extract from Patient Zero
• 11 The Real Sappho: Writing the Tenth Muse for the Contemporary Stage
• 12 Suspended Animation: How the Fetish World Gave Life to Catullus and Callimachus
• 13 Transforming Voices: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Translation
• 14 Self-Portrait in Egg (Excerpt)
• 15 Declassifying Myself
• COLLABORATIONS AND CONVERSATIONS
• 16 The Genesis and Creation of Dido/Elissa: A New Play by Magdalena Zira
• 17 On Not Turning to Stone: Unstaging Women’s Sexual Trauma in an Adaptation of the Myth of Medusa
• 18 The Music of Homer: Anne Carson’s TROYJAM
• 19 Contemporary Women Writers: On Creativity in Recreating the Classics
• 20 Interview with Gwyneth Lewis
• 21 Interview with Selby Wynn Schwartz
• 22 Interview with Ronni Kern
• 23 Interview with Roz Kaveney
• 24 Interview with Nikita Gill
• CREATIVITY FOR THE FUTURE AND INCLUSIVE CLASSICS
• 25 Students Shaping Classics: Non-Traditional, Open Assessment, Creativity, Inclusivity and Shifting Disciplinary Boundaries
• 26 Creative Teaching: Facing the Fear and Doing It Anyway
• 27 Imagining a World of Gods and Spirits Using Smells, Bells and More: A Creative Writing Workshop
• 28 Breaking the Form: Women Writers across Creative and Critical Practice
• 29 Epilogue: No Going Back
• References
• Index
• Copyright