Helena Taylor – författare

Women Writing Antiquity argues that the struggle to define the female intellectual in seventeenth-century France lay at the centre of a broader struggle over the definition of literature and literary knowledge during a time of significant cultural change. As the female intellectual became a figure of debate, France was also undergoing a shift away from the dominance of classical cultural models, the transition towards a standardized modern language, the development of a national literature and literary canon, and the emergence of the literary field. This book explores the intersection of these phenomena, analyzing how a range of women constructed the female intellectual through their reception of Greco-Roman culture. Women Writing Antiquity offers readings of known and less familiar works from a diverse corpus of translators, novelists, poets, linguists, playwrights, essayists, and fairy tale writers, including Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scudéry, Madame de Villedieu, Antoinette Deshoulières, Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, and Anne Dacier. Challenging traditionally formalist and source-text orientated approaches, the study reframes classical reception in terms of authorial self-fashioning and professional strategy, and explores the symbolic value of Latin literacy to an author's projected identity. These writers used reception of Greco-Roman culture to negotiate the value attributed to different genres, the nature of poetics, the legitimacy of varied modes of authorship, the qualities and properties of French, and even how and by whom these topics might be debated. Women Writing Antiquity combines a new take on the literary history of the period with a retelling of the history of the figure of the 'learned woman'.

This collection of essays examines the ways Ovid's diverse œuvre has been translated, rewritten, adapted, and responded to by a range of French and Francophone women from the Renaissance to the present. It aims to reveal lesser-known voices in Ovidian reception studies, and to offer a wider historical perspective on the complex question of Ovid and gender. Ranging from Renaissance poetry to contemporary creative-criticism, it charts an understudied strand of reception studies, emphasizing how a longer view allows us to explore and challenge the notion of a female tradition of Ovidian reception. The range of genres analysed here--poetry, verse and prose translation, theatre, epistolary fiction, autofiction, autobiography, film, creative critique, and novels--also reflect the diversity of the Ovidian texts in reception from the Heroides to the Metamorphoses, from the Amores to the Ars Amatoria, from the Tristia to the Fasti. The study brings an array of critical approaches to bear on well-known authors such as George Sand, Julia Kristeva, and Marguerite Yourcenar, as well as less-known figures, from contemporary writer Linda Lê to the early modern Catherine and Madeline Des Roches, exploring exile, identity, queerness, displacement, voice, expectations of modesty, the poetics of translation, and the problems posed by Ovid's erotized violence, to name just some of the volume's rich themes. The epilogue by translator and novelist Marie Cosnay points towards new eco-critical and creative directions in Ovidian scholarship and reception. Students and scholars of French Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies will find much to interest them in this diverse collection of essays.

Seventeenth-century France saw one of the most significant 'culture wars' Europe has ever known. Culminating in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, this was a confrontational, transitional time for the reception of the classics. Helena Taylor explores responses to the life of the ancient Roman poet, Ovid, within this charged atmosphere. To date, criticism has focused on the reception of Ovid's enormously influential work in this period, but little attention has been paid to Ovid's lives and their uses. Through close analysis of a diverse corpus, which includes prefatory Lives, novels, plays, biographical dictionaries, poetry, and memoirs, this study investigates how the figure of Ovid was used to debate literary taste and modernity and to reflect on translation practice. It shows how the narrative of Ovid's life was deployed to explore the politics and poetics of exile writing; and to question the relationship between fiction and history. In so doing, this book identifies two paradoxes: although an ancient poet, Ovid became key to the formulation of aspects of self-consciously 'modern' cultural movements; and while Ovid's work might have adorned the royal palaces of Versailles, the poetry he wrote after being exiled by the Emperor Augustus made him a figure through which to question the relationship between authority and narrative. The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture not only nuances understanding of both Ovid and life-writing in this period, but also offers a fresh perspective on classical reception: its paradoxes, uses, and quarrels.

From Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) to Pat Barker’s The Voyage Home (2024), there has been a huge rise in women’s rewritings of ancient myths and texts in recent years. Women writers are looking back to the classical past more than ever before, and there is serious public interest in women’s reworkings of the ancient world. But at the same time, this is nothing new: women have been responding to the worlds of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years, across many different time periods, and multiple cultures and languages.This first volume in a two-volume set explores the different ways that women have retold and responded to Classics across the ages, as well as how these responses might resist or unpack the tensions inherent in notions of gender, race, canonicity, class and cultural heritage—in a context in which classical education and scholarship have been confined to the ivory tower, studied by men in pursuit of an understanding of the ‘great men’ of history. Looking at extraordinary women writers across thousands of years, from Sappho, Marguerite de Navarre, Lucrezia Marinella and Renée Vivien to Tayari Jones, Roz Kaveney, Zadie Smith and Anne Carson, from ancient Greece to the Venezuelan diaspora, this volume demonstrates the urgency and the centrality of women's creations in the world of Classics.

From Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) to Pat Barker’s The Voyage Home (2024), there has been a huge rise in women’s rewritings of ancient myths and texts in recent years. Women writers are looking back to the classical past more than ever before, and there is serious public interest in women’s reworkings of the ancient world. But at the same time, this is nothing new: women have been responding to the worlds of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years, across many different time periods, and multiple cultures and languages.This first volume in a two-volume set explores the different ways that women have retold and responded to Classics across the ages, as well as how these responses might resist or unpack the tensions inherent in notions of gender, race, canonicity, class and cultural heritage—in a context in which classical education and scholarship have been confined to the ivory tower, studied by men in pursuit of an understanding of the ‘great men’ of history. Looking at extraordinary women writers across thousands of years, from Sappho, Marguerite de Navarre, Lucrezia Marinella and Renée Vivien to Tayari Jones, Roz Kaveney, Zadie Smith and Anne Carson, from ancient Greece to the Venezuelan diaspora, this volume demonstrates the urgency and the centrality of women's creations in the world of Classics.

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.

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.