Victorian women writers and the classics : the feminine of Homer /
This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative enga...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Language Notes: | English. |
| Published: |
Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
2006.
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| Series: | Classical presences.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic. |
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| Item Description: | Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Oxford, 2003. |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (253 pages) |
| Format: | Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-245) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191712715 019171271X 9781280965289 1280965282 9786610965281 6610965285 9780191536236 0191536237 0199541671 9780199541676 |