Lecture
Forum Antiquum Lectures Spring 2023: The Revisionist Muse: Recent retellings of Greco-Roman myths from a female perspective
- Date
- Thursday 6 April 2023
- Time
- Series
- Forum Antiquum Lectures Series Spring 2023
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 123
Circe, A Thousand Ships, For the most beautiful, Daughters of Sparta, Ariadne... The list of recent novels that retell ancient Greco-Roman myths from a female perspective is long, continuously growing, and hugely popular. In this talk, I will survey this recent literary trend, and will attempt to answer some questions about its backgrounds. What do these novels do with the ancient myths, and why and how do they do so? How new is this phenomenon? The perspective of these narratives is predominantly female, but does that make all of them also 'feminist' in ideology, or not? And finally, what explains the current unprecedented boom in both the writing and the popular reception of such stories from this specific perspective?
Jacqueline Klooster (PhD 2009, University of Amsterdam) is Lecturer in Greek at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. She has published on Hellenistic Poetry, Narratology and the intersection of Leadership values and literature. She recently received a LIRA fonds grant for the writing of a popular scientific book on retellings of Greco-Roman myths from a female perspective.
Registration for the lecture is not necessary, but if you would like to join us for dinner please let us know as soon as possible by sending an e-mail to h.b.de.boer@hum.leidenuniv.nl.
Feel free to join us for drinks after the lecture in De Keyzer, Kaiserstraat 2-4, Leiden.