By Shanyn Fiske
“Heretical Hellenism offers new ideas and opens the door to to an area of cultural influence on Charlotte Brontë’s work that has until now remained virtually unconsidered.”
Brontë Studies
“Fiske’s Heretical Hellenism offers a nuanced perspective…focusing on women who may have lacked formal training in Greek but who nevertheless gained access to antiquity through its representations in Victorian popular culture or who were quick studies of the ancients but nevertheless expressed anxiety about the insufficiency of their classical learning.”
Journal of British Studies
“(T)his is a book that will appeal to classicists, Victorianists, feminists, and historians. Fiske skillfully interlaces Victorian culture and current events that impinge on her subject—the purchase of the Elgin Marbles and their installment in the British Museum…; sensational murder trials; the rise of women’s colleges; and Britain’s reevaluation of its educational system following WWII….”
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature
The prevailing assumption regarding the Victorians’ relationship to ancient Greece is that Greek knowledge constituted an exclusive discourse within elite male domains. Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination challenges that theory and argues that while the information women received from popular sources was fragmentary and often fostered intellectual insecurities, it was precisely the ineffability of the Greek world refracted through popular sources and reconceived through new fields of study that appealed to women writers’ imaginations.
Examining underconsidered sources such as theater history and popular journals, Shanyn Fiske uncovers the many ways that women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy without formal classical training. Through discussions of women writers such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Jane Harrison, Heretical Hellenism demonstrates that women established the foundations of a heretical challenge to traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women’s place in literary history.
Heretical Hellenism provides a historical rationale for a more expansive definition of classical knowledge and offers an interdisciplinary method for understanding the place of classics both in the nineteenth century and in our own time.
Shanyn Fiske is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University at Camden. She is the author of articles on Charlotte Brontë, Jane Harrison, Charles Dickens, and Alicia Little. More info →
Introduction: “Hellenism and Heresy“
Download
Retail price:
$39.95 ·
Save 20% ($31.96)
US and Canada only
Availability and price vary according to vendor.
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Click or tap on a subject heading to sign up to be notified when new related books come out.
Hardcover
978-0-8214-1817-8
Retail price: $39.95,
S.
Release date: July 2008
280 pages
·
6 × 9 in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8214-4291-3
Release date: July 2008
280 pages
Rights: World
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot
By Kimberly VanEsveld Adams
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women (Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot), Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.
Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literary Criticism, Religion · Literary Criticism | Feminist · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies
Amy Levy
Critical Essays
Edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman
Amy Levy has risen to prominence in recent years as one of the most innovative and perplexing writers of her generation. Embraced by feminist scholars for her radical experimentation with queer poetic voice and her witty journalistic pieces on female independence, she remains controversial for her representations of London Jewry that draw unmistakably on contemporary antisemitic discourse.Amy
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Gender Studies · Jewish Studies · Victorian Studies · Literature
Forget Me Not
The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835
By Katherine D. Harris
Katherine D. Harris assesses the phenomenal rise of the literary annual and its origins in English, German, and French literary forms as well as its social influence on women, its redefinition of the feminine, and its effects on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Book and Periodical Studies · Gender Studies · Victorian Studies
The Plot Thickens
Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier
By Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge
In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making.These
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Book and Periodical Studies · Victorian Studies
Sign up to be notified when new Victorian Studies titles come out.
We will only use your email address to notify you of new titles in the subject area(s) you follow. We will never share your information with third parties.
