The representation of women's heterosexual desire in augusta webster's “circe” and “medea in athens”

Sutphin, Christine

doi:10.1080/09699089800200063

Cited by 20 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Augusta Webster, who translated Euripides' Medea (1868), with a closeness to the original that impressed contemporary critics, also wrote a monologue in which Medea, hearing of Jason's death, passionately proclaims how he wronged her in terms that recall her speech to the women of Corinth about the suffering of women. 62 Amy Levy articulated a different aspect of Medea in a fragmentary drama "after Euripides," in which Levy emphasizes Medea's painful experience as a foreigner (paralleling Levy's own encounters with anti-Semitism). Levy also wrote a dramatic monologue spoken by the wife of Socrates which condemns the waste of women's potential based on arbitrary gender standards.…”

Section: A Notable Early Study Of the Classical Allusions In Victoria...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in the Victorian Period

Hurst¹

2021

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Allusions to ancient Greece and Rome are pervasive in Victorian culture, in literary texts and material artifacts, on the popular stage, and in political discourse. Authors such as Matthew Arnold, Thackeray, Tennyson, Clough, Pater, Wilde, and Swinburne studied Latin and Greek for years at school or university and exploited their classical learning for creative purposes. The sheer familiarity of classical culture, based on years of studying Homer and Virgil at school, made it possible for intellectuals to draw parallels between contemporary political reforms and the democratic context of Greek tragedy, or to insist, like Arnold, that Periclean Athens should be a model for 19th-century Britain. At a time when the predominance of Latin and Greek in formal education was beginning to be questioned, there was increasing demand for translations and adaptations of classical literature, history, and myth, so that a wider readership could share in the richness of the classical inheritance. Outsiders were particularly eager to learn Greek or read Greek texts in translation, and authors such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot achieved a remarkable degree of proficiency with little assistance. Greek epic and tragedy were appropriated by the authors of dramatic monologues, novels, and theatrical burlesques to engage with contemporary concerns about marriage and divorce, the role of women, and the apparent impossibility of heroism in the modern world. Toward the end of the period, classical literature was increasingly scrutinized from new perspectives: approaches based on anthropology, archaeology, and sociology presented familiar texts in new ways and opened up possibilities for redefining aspects of gender and sexuality in the contemporary world.

show abstract

Section: A Notable Early Study Of the Classical Allusions In Victoria...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in the Victorian Period

Hurst¹

2021

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…She responded creatively to classical texts: having translated Medea , with a particular forcefulness in the speech in which the heroine laments the wrongs of women, Webster went on to explore Medea’s grievances against Jason in the dramatic monologue ‘Medea in Athens’. Webster and Amy Levy emphasise Jason’s cruel desertion and Medea’s fear of losing her children, and draw attention to the persistence of sexual double standards (Sutphin; Hurst; Fiske). In Adam Bede , Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt, George Eliot suggests parallels between Medea and her characters, offering complex and not entirely unsympathetic renderings of the tragic heroine, as part of her larger project of reworking Greek myth in the modern form of the novel (King; Jenkyns Victorians ; Easterling; Travis).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%