American Women and Classical Myths

Edited by Gregory A. Staley

Published by: Baylor University Press

Imprint: Baylor University Press

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...

Sales Date: 2008-11-30

Paperback
ISBN 9781932792850
300 Pages

$39.99

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

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

Gregory A. Staley (Ph.D. Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Maryland, College Park and a Rome Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

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