Women Re-Creating Classics

Discusses contemporary issues regarding women and classics from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on topics such as creativity, gender, race, class and inclusivity.

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.