| From the 1970's on, female authors have shown an increasing interest in recovering the stories of the women of classical antiquity. At the same time, classical scholars have turned their attention to the world of classical women, attempting to reconstruct their lives from a textual record from which women are often absent. This study reconsiders the currency of women in classical literature, and their subsequent reception in contemporary fiction, to shed new light on our understanding of the connection between women and fictional literature in Greek and Roman antiquity and the twenty-first century, and the deep, complex interrelationship between the two.;A re-construction of the relationship between women and mimetic fiction in classical texts from Homer to Virgil reveals that women in classical literature are intimately connected to narrative mechanisms of voice, plot, authorship and inspiration -- but, most importantly of all, that they are agents of and conscious participants in their relationship to literature, connecting to their potential for creativity and inspiration even when they are most conscious of their objectification. At the same time, it is argued that contemporary female authors like Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin rework the tales of the women of classical literature both to appropriate the cultural capital inherent in the notion of `classical' literature and thus to rewrite themselves back into the canon, and to meditate upon and explore the complexities of female authoriality and canonicity. Rather than positing a mono-directional reading of some kind of female tradition, therefore, this study is located at the intersection of tradition and reception, past and present, interpreting the discourse of female literariness in English as a continuum that is always in dialogue with itself and, specifically, with its classical past -- thus suggesting a model for a paradigm shift towards a dialogical, mutually productive relationship between reception studies and traditional philology. |
