Women Re-Creating Classics - by Emily Hauser & Helena Taylor (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Drawing together an interdisciplinary range of scholarly and creative voices, this volume looks at contemporary discussions surrounding women's engagement with the classical past. There is a discussion as to why classical creative retellings are so popular now, as well as considerations of what creativity can do to foster new ways of thinking and writing about classics, thus blurring the boundary between the creative and the critical. In particular, the 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 selective few"--

Book Synopsis

In the last few years, there has been a major and unmissable surge in women's retellings and re-creations of ancient myths and textsthat 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.

Review Quotes

Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices offers audiences an opportunity to flip the mirror of classical mythology and reflect it against our own experiences and visions. The most unique contributions of this volume come from the creative works by women novelists, poets and playwrights who have thoughtfully and beautifully engaged with classical tales of violence, oppression and heroism. Alongside well-known figures like M. Miller and J. Saint, the second half of this volume brings these creative voices into direct dialogue with more conventional scholars, allowing us to see the creative process and choices in action. For those considering this feminist neoclassical moment in the 21st century-its inspirations and implications-this is a key volume that places a wide range of diverse voices in context and conversation, rather than lionising only a few well-known bestsellers and pop hits.

The editors are to be commended for gifting to scholars of classical reception a vast trove of material relating to the rich afterlives of ancient Greek and Roman women in contemporary anglophone literature. In essay form and in conversation with women academics, invaluable insights are provided by an impressive line-up of women artists.

About the Author

Emily Hauser is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of Mythica: A New History of Homer's World, Through the Women Written Out of It (2025), How Women Became Poets (2023) and For the Most Beautiful (2016). She is co-editor of Reading Poetry, Writing Genre (2018).

Helena Taylor is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (2024) and The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture (2017). She is co-editor of Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (2023) and Women and Querelles in Early Modern France (2021).