Heretical Hellenism

We present today a new scholar book with Brontë connections and a new paperback edition of the collection of essays The Brontës (Authors in Context):

Heretical Hellenism
Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination
By Shanyn Fiske

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.

The introduction can be read here.

And Oxford University Press reissues with a new cover Patricia Ingham's 2006 book:

The Brontës (Authors in Context)
Patricia Ingham
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-953666-5
Publication date: 14 August 2008
304 pages, Halftones and line drawings, 196x129 mm
Series: Oxford World's Classics

The extraordinary creativity of the Bronte sisters, who between them wrote some of the most enduring fiction in the English language, continues to fascinate and intrigue modern readers. The tragedy of their early deaths adds poignancy to their novels, and in the popular imagination they have become mythic figures. And yet, as Patricia Ingham shows, they were fully engaged with the world around them, and their writing, from the juvenilia to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights , reflects the preoccupations of the age in which they lived. Their novels, which so shocked their contemporaries, address the burning issues of the day: class, gender, race, religion, and mental disorders. As well as examining these connections, Patricia Ingham also shows how film and other media have reinterpreted the novels for the twenty-first century. The book includes a chronology of the Brontes, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.

Categories: Books, Scholar