American Women and Classical Myths
Edited by Gregory A. Staley
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Subjects: All Classics, Women's Studies |
American women, in contrast to their European counterparts, have long engaged with and critiqued the myths of antiquity. American Women and Classical Myths is a collection of essays exploring the paradoxical attitudes that women in the U.S. have exhibited over a span of more than two centuries. Contributors address two broad topics. They examine the attempts of several influential American women, including Margaret Fuller, Edith Hamilton and Hilda Doolittle, to interpret myth for an audience that distrusted it. In addition, they show how American women have reinterpreted myths about women such as Antigone, Penelope, or the Amazons to create identities appropriate to women in the New World.
Introduction: The Book of Myths Gregory A. Staley
Part I: American Women
1. Examples of Classical Myth in the Poems of Phillis Wheatley
Julian Mason
2. Margaret Fuller and Her Timeless Friends
Marie Cleary
3. H.D., Daughter of Helen: Mythology as Actuality
Sheila Murnaghan
4. Those Two or Three Human Stories: Willa Cather, Classical Myth, and the New World Epic
Mary R. Ryder
5. Edith Hamilton and Greco-Roman Mythology
Judith P. Hallett
Part II: Classical Myths
6. Liberating Woman: Athena as Cultural Icon in the United States
Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch
7. Victorian Antigone: Classicism and Women’s Education in America, 1840-1900
Caroline Winterer
8. The Figure of Penelope in Twentieth-Century Poetry by American Women
Lillian E. Doherty
9. The Amazons: Wonder Women in America
Gregory A. Staley
Notes
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
In this beautiful volume, scholarship and storytelling make a fine home together.
—Susan Ford Wiltshire, Professor of Classics, Chair Department of Classical Studies, Vanderbilt University
"This volume is distinguished by a specific focus on the United States, and in particular on women's interaction with classical mythology.... American Women and Classical Myths is recommended for information on women's contribution to the history of Classics in the United States, as well as for a study of the reception of female figures from Classical mythology."
—International Journal of Classical Tradition (2010, 17:1)
Gregory A. Staley, associate professor of classics at the University of Maryland, College Park and a Rome Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University. He has published articles on Latin and Greek literature (Sophocles, Virgil, Seneca, and Juvenal) and on the classical tradition in America (Robinson Jeffers, Washington Irving, and the myth of America in the work of Hélène Cixous). His book Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. In 1999 he organized a conference on American women and classical myths, out of which this volume has developed.
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