American women, in contrast to their European counterparts, have long engaged with and critiqued the myths of antiquity. American Women and Classical Myths is a collection of essays exploring the paradoxical attitudes that women in the U.S. have exhibited over a span of more than two centuries. Contributors address two broad topics. They examine the attempts of several influential American women, including Margaret Fuller, Edith Hamilton and Hilda Doolittle, to interpret myth for an audience that distrusted it. In addition, they show how American women have reinterpreted myths about women such as Antigone, Penelope, or the Amazons to create identities appropriate to women in the New World.

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology presents a collection of essays that explore a wide variety of aspects of Greek and Roman myths and their critical reception from antiquity to the present day. Reveals the importance of mythography to the survival, dissemination, and popularization of classical myth from the ancient world to the present day Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Offers a series of carefully selected in-depth readings, including both popular and less well-known examples

The dissemination of classical material to children has long been a major form of popularization with far-reaching effects, although until very recently it has received almost no attention within the growing field of classical reception studies. This volume explores the ways in which children encountered the world of ancient Greece and Rome in Britain and the United States over a century-long period beginning in the 1850s, as well as adults' literary responses to their own childhood encounters with antiquity. Rather than discussing the role of classics in education, it focuses on books read for enjoyment, and on two genres of children's literature in particular: the myth collection and the historical novel. The tradition of myths retold as children's stories is traced in the work of writers and illustrators from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley to Roger Lancelyn Green and Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, while the discussion of historical fiction focuses particularly on the roles of nationality and gender in the construction of an ancient world for modern children. The book concludes with an investigation of the connections between childhood and antiquity made by writers for adults, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. Recognition of the fundamental role in children's literature of adults' ideas about what children want or need is balanced throughout by attention to the ways in which child readers have made such works their own. The formative experiences of antiquity discussed throughout help to explain why despite growing uncertainty about the appeal of antiquity to modern children, the classical past remains perennially interesting and inspiring.

Myths reflect, reinforce, and sometimes subvert gender ideologies and so have an influence in the 'real world'. This is true in the present no less than when the Greek and Roman myths were created. The struggles to redefine gender roles and identities in our own time are inevitably reflected in our interpretations and retellings of these classical myths. Using the new lenses provided by gender studies and diverse forms of feminism, Lillian Doherty re-examines some of the major approaches to myth interpretation in the twentieth century: psychological, ritualist, 'charter', structuralist and folklorist. She also explores 'popular' uses of classical mythology - from television and comic books to the evocation of goddesses in Jungian psychology.

In The Classics and Children's Literature between West and East a team of contributors from different continents offers a survey of the reception of Classical Antiquity in children’s and young adults’ literature by applying regional perspectives.

Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly is the first written history of the pioneering women born between the Renaissance and 1913 who played significant roles in the history of classical scholarship. Facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles from patriarchal social systems and educational institutions - from learning Latin and Greek as a marginalized minority, to being excluded from institutional support, denigrated for being lightweight or over-ambitious, and working in the shadows of husbands, fathers, and brothers - they nevertheless continued to teach, edit, translate, analyse, and elucidate the texts left to us by the ancient Greeks and Romans. In this volume twenty essays by international leaders in the field chronicle the lives of women from around the globe who have shaped the discipline over more than five hundred years. Arranged in broadly chronological order from the Italian, Iberian, and Portuguese Renaissance through to the Stalinist Soviet Union and occupied France, they synthesize illuminating overviews of the evolution of classical scholarship with incisive case-studies into often overlooked key figures: some, like Madame Anne Dacier, were already famous in their home countries but have been neglected in previous, male-centred accounts, while others have been almost completely lost to the mainstream cultural memory. This book identifies and celebrates them - their frustrations, achievements, and lasting records; in so doing it provides the classical scholars of today, regardless of gender, with the female intellectual ancestors they did not know they had.

American women have created an especially vigorous and innovative poetry, beginning in 1632 when Anne Bradstreet set aside her needle and picked up her "poet's pen." The topics of American women poets have been various, their images their own, and their modes of expression original. Emily Stipes Watts does not imply that the work of American men and that of American women are two different kinds of poetry, although they have been treated as such in the past. It is her aim, rather, to delineate and define the poetic tradition of women as crucial to the understanding of American poetry as a whole. By 1850, American women of all colors, religions, and social classes were writing and publishing poetry. Within the critical category of "female poetry," developed from 1800 to 1850, these women experimented boldly and prepared the way for the achievement of such women as Emily Dickinson in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed at times—for example from 1860 through 1910—it was women who were at the outer edge of prosodic experimentation and innovation in American poetry. Moving chronologically, Professor Watts broadly characterizes the state of American poetry for each period, citing the dominant male poets; she then focuses on women contemporaries, singling out and analyzing their best work. This volume not only brings to light several important women poets but also represents the discovery of a tradition of women writers. This is a unique and invaluable contribution to the history of American literature.

While numerous classical dictionaries identify the figures and tales of Greek and Roman mythology, this reference book explains the allegorical significance attached to the myths by Medieval and Renaissance authors. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries for the gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines, and places of classical myth and legend. Each entry includes a brief account of the myth, with reference to the Greek and Latin sources. The entry then discusses how Medieval and Renaissance commentators interpreted the myth, and how poets, dramatists, and artists employed the allegory in their art. Each entry includes a bibliography and the volume concludes with appendices and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses both to the Odyssey and to the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ - memoir, poetry, children's literature, rap, novels - testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer's afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer's footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of not only classics, but also translation studies, comparative literature, and women's writing will find much to interest them, while the volume's concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman's voice.

This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can 'speak the unspeakable' and empower their subjects as well as themselves.