Audio-Visual Roman Women - (Imagines - Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing) by Maria Wyke & Monika Wozniak (Hardcover)

About the Book

A cohesive, interdisciplinary study of the imaginative power screen media has to reshape our perception of Roman women, covering over 100 years.

Book Synopsis

This open-access bookis an interdisciplinary and transnational study of how screen media can shape our perception of Roman women and project present gender inequalities onto them. Maria Wyke and Monika Wozniak explore a range of representations that have given life to Roman women through a multisensory experience of history as image, movement and sound, starting from the 1900s through to the 2020s (from the arrival of cinema to the ascendance of video games). This book asks: what sources do screen media draw on for their Roman women (given the scarcity of suitable ancient material), how are they assembled aesthetically and ideologically using the specific devices of such media (from camerawork to gameplay), and who are they made by and for (especially in terms of gender)?

Each chapter investigates the diverse ways these representations interlock with the social position of women at the time in which they were made, and consider to what extent they have responded to the emergence of feminism, the revisionist scholarship on ancient women that emerged in the mid-1970s, and the rise of the #MeToo movement from 2006. The challenge of creating authentic yet compelling portrayals of Roman women is greater than ever, in a media culture marked by anti-feminist rhetoric and a wide gap between our ancient sources (where female agency is tightly constrained) and current expectations for powerful women in popular culture. The volume will therefore provide a stronger platform on which to build the Roman women of the future.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence onbloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University College London.

Review Quotes

This is reception history at its finest. The book takes the reader on a voyage through film history and different genres from the days of silent movies to modern TV shows, through literature from 19th century novels to modern fan fiction. Deciphering the cross-media entanglement of Roman women in these sources offers revealing insights into how these women were and are stereotyped, but also empowered.

About the Author

Maria Wyke is Professor of Latin at University College London, UK. She is author of Caesar in the USA (2012), The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (2000), and Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (1997).

Monika Wozniak is Associate Professor of Polish Language and Literature at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She is author of Ebbs and Flows: Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz in the Italian Literary and Cultural Circuit (2024) and, with Maria Wyke, co-editor of The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations (2020).