Homer's Daughters: Women's Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Description

This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses both to the Odyssey and to the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ - memoir, poetry, children's literature, rap, novels - testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer's afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer's footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of not only classics, but also translation studies, comparative literature, and women's writing will find much to interest them, while the volume's concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman's voice. Cover Homer’s Daughters: Women’s Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Editors’ Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Introduction 1: ‘After his wine-dark sea’: H.D. in Homer 2: Romantic Encounters with Homer in Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles 3: Female Homers: A Feminist nostos? Weil and Bespaloff—Adversaries or Allies? Feminist or Female nostos? Homeric nostos 4: Christa Wolf’s Cassandra: Different Times, Different Views 5: Feminist at Second Glance? Alice Oswald’s Memorial as a Response to Homer’s Iliad 6: Kate Tempest: A ‘Brand New Homer’ for a Creative Future Introduction Orality and Performance in a Post-Literate Era Brand New Ancients Hold Your Own Coda: Creative Futures 7: Rereading Penelope’s Web: The Anxieties of Female Authorship in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad 8: Excavations in Homer: Speculative Archaeologies in Alice Oswald’s and Barbara Köhler’s Responses to the Iliad and the Odyssey Alice Oswald: Lament and pastoral in Homer’s Iliad Barbara Köhler: The Great Web in Homer’s Odyssey 9: Between Night and Day Barbara Köhler’s Lyric Odyssey Penelope in the Snow Recognition Night Schrödinger’s Cat The Epilogue 10: Monologue and Dialogue: The Odyssey in Contemporary Women’s Poetry 11: The Forecast is Hurricane: Circe’s Powers and Circe’s Desires in Modern Women’s Poetry 12: Iberian Sibyl: Francisca Aguirre on Cavafy and the Journey Out of Ithaca In Search of Ithaca Aguirre’s Ithaca Ithacan Geographies: Francisca Aguirre and C. P. Cavafy You Won’t Find Another Shore Reweaving our Ithacas, our Selves 13: ‘Cut down to size’: Female Voices and Adventure in Adèle Geras’s Ithaka 14: ‘Health isn’t making everybody into a Greek ideal’: Overcoming Abjection in Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital Odyssey Meeting Monsters: Rethinking Abject Figurations of Cancer Let’s Go Home: Love, Empathy, Remission Concluding Thoughts 15: ‘Thinking through our mothers’: Cixous and Homer beyond the Third Wave 16: Epilogue: Translating Homer as a Woman Three Passages: The Dog Face, the Sluts, and the Bed Women-friendly Odysseys, Then and Now Bibliography Translations of Homer General Bibliography Index of Names Index of Passages