Writing Herstory through Ancient Greek Letters - by Antonios Pontoropoulos (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first comprehensive feminist reading of ancient Greek fictional letter collections.

Book Synopsis

Offering the first comprehensive feminist analysis of ancient Greek fictional letters, this book focuses on the centuries between the Roman Imperial period and late antiquity. Through an exploration of modern French and Anglo-American feminist theory, Pontoropoulos creates an analytical framework using the scholarship of Hèléne Cixous and Alice Jardine. On the ancient side, the literary representations of women in the letter collections of Aelian, Alciphron and Aristaenetus form the main corpus of study.

In this volume, Pontoropoulos structures his argument around three pertinent questions: can ancient fictional letters written by men tell us anything about their ancient representations of women? How do these letters inform our modern understanding of concepts such as gender and agency? Do these letter collections succeed in providing the reader with a variety of fictional female characters? The women in these literary collections are presented as speaking, rhetorical subjects that subvert the expected discourses of desire and shift the perspective from the male to the female point of view. In this sense, they not only present the reader with a highly-layered intertext, but also with a text that challenges expected gendered norms.

Review Quotes

The fictional letter is one of the literary expressions in which women's voices are most clearly expressed in ancient Greek literature. This book is an efficient guide to discover the mechanisms of ventriloquisation put into practice by the rhetors of the imperial period, all of them male writers, in order to give a personal and authentic voice to different groups of women in classical Antiquity.

About the Author

Antonios Pontoropoulos is Affiliated Postdoctoral Researcher in Ancient Greek literature at the Swedish Institute in Rome, Italy.