Women Re-Creating Classics

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).

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.

• List of FiguresList of ContributorsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction (Emily Hauser and Helena Taylor, Exeter University, UK)Creative Voices1. Rewriting Greek Myth as a Woman (Emily Hauser, Exeter University, UK)2. Classics and Craft (Madeline Miller, Independent Scholar, USA)3. Return to the Labyrinth: Retelling the Stories of Mythical Women in Contemporary Poetry (Fiona Benson, Independent Scholar, UK)4. Eurydice (Jennifer Saint, King's College London, UK)5. Only Hope Remained (Rani Selvarajah, Independent Scholar, UK)6. In the Bad Times (Cait Kremenstein, Independent Scholar, UK)7. The Homeric Hymn to Dionysus (Roz Kaveney, Independent Scholar, UK)8. Stage Manager’s Notes (Gwyneth Lewis, Independent Scholar, UK)9. Excerpt from Exit Kassandra (Carrie Etter, University of Bristol, UK)10. a vespere nomen: An extract from patient zero (Kit Byford, Independent Scholar, UK)11. The Real Sappho: Writing the Tenth Muse for the Contemporary Stage (Aimee Suzara, San Francisco State University and College of San Mateo, USA)12. Suspended Animation: How the Fetish World Gave Life to Catullus and Callimachus (Isobel Williams, Independent Scholar, UK)13. Transforming Voices: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Translation (Victoria Punch, Exeter University, UK)14. Self-portrait in Egg (excerpt) (Jane Alison, University of Virginia, USA)15. Declassifying Myself (Donna Zuckerberg, Independent Scholar, USA)Collaborations and Conversations16. The Genesis and Creation of Dido/Elissa, a New Play by Magdalena Zira (Magdalena Zira, Independent Scholar, Cyprus; Edith Hall, Durham University, UK)17. On Not Turning to Stone: Unstaging Women’s Sexual Trauma in an Adaptation of the Myth of Medusa (Wendy Haines, Independent Scholar, UK; Christine Plastow, Open University, UK)18. The Music of Homer: Anne Carson’s TROYJAM (Yopie Prins, University of Michigan, USA; Anne Carson, Independent Scholar, Canada)19. Contemporary Women Writers: On Creativity in Recreating the Classics (Clare Pollard and Carrie Etter, Independent Scholars, UK)20. Interview with Gwyneth Lewis, by Polly Stoker (University of Winchester, UK)21. Interview with Selby Wynn Schwartz, by Helena Taylor (University of Exeter, UK)22. Interview with Ronni Kern, by Ruby Blondell (University of Washington, USA)23. Interview with Roz Kaveney, by Jennifer Ingleheart (Durham University, UK)24. Interview with Nikita Gill, by Emily Hauser (University of Exeter, UK)Creativity for the Future and Inclusive Classics25. Students Shaping Classics: Non-traditional, Open Assessment, Creativity, Inclusivity and Shifting Disciplinary Boundaries (Helen Lovatt, University of Nottingham, UK)26. Creative Teaching: Facing the Fear and Doing it Anyway (Sharon Marshall, University of Exeter, UK)27. Imagining a World of Gods and Spirits Using Smells, Bells and More: A Creative Writing Workshop (Caroline Lawrence)28. Breaking the Form: Women Writers across Creative and Critical Practice (Tom Geue, University of St. Andrews, UK; Emily Hauser, University of Exeter, UK; Daisy Dunn, Independent Scholar, UK)29. Epilogue: No Going Back (Emily Greenwood, Harvard University, USA)NotesBibliographyIndex