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From Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles (2012) to Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019), there has been a huge rise in women’s literary receptions of classics 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 responses to the ancient world. But at the same time, this is nothing new: women have been receiving classics for hundreds of years, across many different time periods, and multiple cultures.
This first volume in a two-volume set explores the different ways that woman have retold and responded to classics, as well as how these responses might resist or unpack the tensions inherent in notions of gender, race, canonicity, class and cultural heritage. This is of particular significance when we consider that classical education and scholarship has 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 such as Sappho, Lucrezia Marinella and Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison, Roz Kaveney and Zadie Smith, this volumes demonstrates centrality of women's creations in the world of classics.