Receptions of Women in Ancient Greek Literature

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is dedicated to current approaches on women in ancient Greek literature. 50 years after the publication of Sarah Pomeroy’s landmark Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (1975), ancient gender studies have become an established field of teaching, scholarly inquiry, and themed workshops in Classics, the Humanities, and the Arts. Important studies and collections such as Froma Zeitlin’s, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (1996), Helene Foley’s Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (2001), and André Lardinois and Laura McClure’s, Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society (2001) have shaped the critical debates on women and gender in Greek literature over the past three decades. Representing a wide array of approaches, their scholarship contributed to big questions such as women’s agency and its limits, women’s positionality and relation to the male hegemonic self as well as the recovery of women’s access to speech and self-representation.

Though women have a vibrant presence in ancient Greek literary traditions, our knowledge of their agency, influence, and capacities is by-and-large subject to the cultural constraints and systemic inequalities women faced on the basis of their gender. Literary texts reflect their marginalization and the thinking around it through broader intersections between gender and sexuality, ethnicity, race, and class which bring women into the purview of other marginalized or underrepresented groups.

Reception theory and reception studies offer access to a broad array of approaches which intersect with the project of recovering and interpreting the imprint of women and gender in ancient texts and their adaptations across time and space. These include, but are not limited to feminist and political theory, black and postcolonial criticism, ethnography as well as a diverse set of approaches, ranging from literary criticism, cultural archaeology and material culture to performance and media theory.

The study of reception engages broadly with the processes of adaptation, transformation, and erasure. The selection and canonization of texts as well as their transmission in new literary texts and other forms of artistic production through theater, music, dance, and film converge with and potentiate new assessments of women’s presence in or absence from ancient Greek literary traditions.

This Special Issue invites scholars in Classics, Reception, Performance, and Critical Theory to explore the relationship between women’s literary and artistic receptions in ancient Greek literary and documentary texts from antiquity to the present. The call for papers invites contributors to approach the topic either broadly or through specific case studies and offer new perspectives on women in ancient Greek literature.

Dr. Angeliki Tzanetou
Guest Editor

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• women in ancient Greek literature
• ancient gender studies
• women in classics