Women Creating Classics

From Madeline Millers The Song of Achilles (2011) to Pat Barkers The Voyage Home (2024), there has been a huge rise in womens 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 womens 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 heritagein 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 Rene 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.