Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices

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.

Emily Hauser is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests include ancient women writers, gender and authorship in the classical world, and the reception of classical women by contemporary female authors. She has published on women writers in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the reception of the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad.

Helena Taylor is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Classics and French Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (2023), Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (2023), and The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture (2017). She is the co-editor of Women and Querelles in Early Modern France (2021) and she has published a number of articles on early modern women’s classical reception.