The field of classical reception studies has been booming since the turn of the millennium. Yet it is not really a field at all. Rather, it is a series of interventions into the innumerable creative works that have drawn upon ancient Greek and Latin traditions unceasingly since antiquity. Given the extraordinary impact of Homer on all kinds of literary forms throughout the millennia, simply identifying various responses to Homer as being by women does little to unify the vast range of possible material. This creates a challenge for anyone who wishes, as Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos do in the volume under review, to unite a series of articles on reception under a single umbrella.
The umbrella in question is a capacious one, covering a wide range of literary forms: novels, many different forms of poetry, intellectual and scholarly responses, various modes of adaptation and translation, even a children’s book. The authors under study hail from Germany, Spain and France as well as multiple anglophone countries. Their works, too, range from the usual suspects (Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, Christa Wolf’s Cassandra) to more recent groundbreaking works like Kate (now Kae) Tempest’s hip-hop epic Brand New Ancients and the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’ A Hospital Odyssey. Some of these authors are not so much Homer’s daughters as his grand-daughters, especially Francisca Aguirre, a female Spanish poet whose Ítaca, discussed here by Victoria Reuter, responds to the Odyssey via the male Greek Cavafy’s famous treatment in his Ithaka.
The contributors are diverse as well. Though all female, and all based in the British Isles or North America, they are not all classicists, which produces an interesting variety of perspectives, most strikingly in the case of Emily Spiers, a lecturer in creative futures at Lancaster University who examines Kate Tempest’s poetry through the lens of futures studies. They are also at various career stages, ranging from eminent scholars who participated in the groundbreaking marriage of Classics and feminism in the 1970s to freshly minted PhDs. Yet their contributions are uniformly stimulating, scholarly and polished; a credit not only to the authors but to the two editors.
In their helpful introduction, Cox and Theodorakopoulos make a virtue of diversity while providing a broader context in order to establish a unity that goes beyond mere female authorship. Since the authors under study are virtually all from 20th-century Europe or North America, they all felt the impact of the two great world wars, and their aftermath, and lived through one or more of that century’s multiple ‘waves’ of feminism. This helps to generate some common themes, most noticeably ‘Penelopean poetics’ (to use Barbara Clayton’s term): the use of weaving, so closely associated with women in antiquity, as a metaphor and model for women’s verbal art.
This theme shows up, for obvious reasons, throughout the book. But discussions of the Odyssey are not limited to Penelope. Circe, in particular, makes several welcome appearances. Other contributors discuss the appropriation of Odyssean male heroism (with its relegation of women to a static, home-bound existence) as a template for women’s psychological journeys (a satisfying payback for the ancient male habit of appropriating creative female activities like weaving and childbirth). The Iliad, which is, refreshingly, nearly as prominent as the traditionally more ‘feminine’ Odyssey, provides another recurrent theme, namely the questioning of epic (masculine) heroism with its supposed glorification of violence.
Another pervasive theme is translation: what is it, how does it work, how can it be distinguished (if at all) from adaptation? Emily Wilson’s account of translating the Odyssey while female is presented as an epilogue, but I would have liked to see it up front, raising the reader’s awareness of the strategies and compromises involved in even the most ‘faithful’ rendition, before moving on to multiple variations on what ‘counts’ as a translation. A related thread (to use the inevitable metaphor) involves questions about reading with or against the grain, or what Genevieve Liveley, in regard to H.D., calls ‘releasing’, as opposed to ‘resistant’ readings. Rather than merely defying Homer as a patriarchal Ur-text, many of these authors draw on elements within the Greek epics that already raise uncomfortable questions about the glorification of heroic violence, such as the brief ‘epitaphs’ for fallen warriors in the Iliad. Alice Oswald, discussed by both Carolin Hahnemann and Georgina Paul, moved these moments to the centre of her poem Memorial, reframing them to highlight the costs of warfare to women.
Most readers, like myself, will be familiar with only a handful of the texts under discussion. This piecemeal attraction is the main weakness of such collections. It is counterbalanced, however, by one of the particular joys of reception studies: the joy of discovering unfamiliar reworkings of familiar ancient material. I will mention just three highlights from my own reading of this volume. First, Carol Ann Duffy’s grotesquely hilarious treatment of Circe as an expert in cooking with pork (discussed by Isobel Hurst and by Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah Roberts). Second, Adèle Geras’ Ithaka, which in Francesca Richards’ reading seems like a brilliant attempt to walk the tightrope of presenting a feminist Odyssey to children without radically misrepresenting Homer. Finally, Gwyneth Lewis’ modern epic A Hospital Odyssey, analysed here by Ruth MacDonald. In this powerful, extraordinarily creative poem, Lewis uses the Odyssey to parse the experience of caring for her cancer-ridden husband, an experience that modern medicine has rendered as long and wearying, as fraught with hope and despair, and as beset by monsters as the original hero’s journey.
