Women Creating Classics
A Retrospective
Published on 10. July 2025
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-1-350-44437-9 (ISBN)
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 Renee 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.
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 Renee 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.
Reviews / Votes
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, USAMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Illustrations
10 bw illus.
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
619 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-350-44437-9 (9781350444379)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
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 Homer's 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).
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).
Content
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: Renee 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 Koehler'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
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: Renee 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 Koehler'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