https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/187 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1449 In writing her 1836 novel Philothea, the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child drew on careful reading of Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, Euripides’ Ion, and Plato’s Republic. The novel’s plot, organized around Pericles’ law that both parents must be Athenian citizens for their child to have citizenship, shares features with arguments for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights that Child made in other writings throughout her lifetime. Child combined a sentimental romance narrative about an enslaved woman that encourages readers to become abolitionists with allusions to Plato’s Republic that affirm the abolitionist conviction that slavery is absolutely unjust. Previous scholarship has treated Child’s use of Greek material in a rather general way. This article demonstrates just how precisely she incorporated elements of Plutarch, Euripides and Plato into the abolitionist story she chose to tell. By expanding understanding of Child’s engagement with the classical past that her gender kept her from learning about in a university setting, this study also contributes to the growing body of knowledge about how women did get access to — and put to use — classical learning. jeu., 04 janv. 2024 11:19:04 +0100 jeu., 18 janv. 2024 09:55:21 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1449 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/174 Based on evidence that is very rarely considered together in scholarship, this paper argues that Corinna of Tanagra has been associated with an idea of artistic authority in antiquity. This is a subject on which the ancient reception of Corinna differs considerably from the modern appreciations of the poet. By applying the hermeneutical approach of reception studies, this paper shows that the presence of an idea of Corinna as an artistic authority may be found in both ancient texts and the figurative arts, as well as in postclassical scholarship. Here, in her pre-twentieth century receptions, Corinna is portrayed both as honoured in her own right and as superior to the poet Pindar, who according to the ancient tradition was her contemporary, compatriot and fellow student. As will be argued, the shift in Corinna’s reception history occurred with the 1907 publication of the Berlin Papyrus, which contained the largest extant fragments of her output to date. From this point onwards, a debate on Corinna’s date, which, according to some, may have been later than Pindar’s, has eclipsed the authoritative aspects of her reception history. The article closes by suggesting that a re-evaluation of the idea of Corinna as an artistic authority, facilitated by a reception studies approach, should urge current scholarship to assess the debate about her date and place in the history of classical literature afresh. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:30:20 +0200 mer., 13 déc. 2023 09:34:11 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/174 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/793 The fortieth anniversary of Sarah Pomeroy’s groundbreaking Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (1975) is an occasion for recognizing Pomeroy’s thoughtful and flexible approach to the methodological problem of using male-authored fictional texts, such as the Homeric epics and Athenian tragedy, as sources for ancient women’s history. In her chapter on the women of tragedy, Pomeroy acknowledges the limits of tragic texts as testimony to women’s lives but still makes careful use of them, sometimes as fearful male fantasies or “nightmares of the victors”, sometimes as reflections of women’s actual roles in religious and domestic life, sometimes as expressions of sympathy for women’s difficult circumstances. Ten years later, Phyllis Culham initiated a vigorous debate among feminist classicists by calling for the exclusion of literary evidence in favor of material and subliterary sources that could give more direct access to ancient women’s lived realities. Culham’s call was answered by a series of rebuttals and two decades of scholarship that followed Pomeroy’s lead in identifying connections between tragic texts and the gendered experiences of actual Athenians. The recent turn to reception in classical literary studies offers the opportunity to consider ancient male-authored fictions in relation to the real experiences of modern women. This discussion focuses on two wartime memoirs by twentieth century women, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and the anonymously-published A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Captured City (1954). Each woman’s story echoes the Homeric epics and confirms two important points made by critics responding to Culham: that lived experience cannot be extricated from the ordering patterns of fiction or myth-making; and that the stories told by male authors are sometimes stories that women might tell. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:13:55 +0200 jeu., 09 mars 2023 16:28:57 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/793