Emily Hauser (born 1987 or 1988) [1] is a British scholar of classics and a historical fiction novelist. She is a lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter and has published three novels in her 'Golden Apple' trilogy: For the Most Beautiful (2016), For the Winner (2017) and For the Immortal (2018).
Hauser was born in Brighton, United Kingdom [2] and brought up in Suffolk. [3] [4] She attended The Abbey school in Woodbridge and Orwell Park School near Ipswich, where she began learning Greek at age 11. [5] [6] [7]
Hauser studied classics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she was taught by Mary Beard, [6] [3] graduating with her BA in 2009. [2] She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at Harvard University for the 2010-2011 academic year. [2] She completed an MA and MPhil at Yale University in 2015, and her Ph.D. at Yale in 2017, [2] with a thesis titled 'Since Sappho: Women in Classical Literature and Contemporary Women’s Writing' supervised by Emily Greenwood. [8] While at Yale, Hauser twice received the Alice Derby Lang Essay Prize awarded to students attaining "high scholarship" in classical literature or art. [9] [8]
After receiving her Ph.D., she returned to Harvard as a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows for 2017–2018, [4] and joined the University of Exeter as a lecturer in classics and ancient history in July 2018. [4]
In 2011, Hauser translated Philippe Rousseau's 2001 article "L'Intrigue de Zeus" from French to English for the Harvard University Center of Hellenic Studies. [10] [11]
Hauser's academic work focuses on authorship and gender in antiquity, women in Homeric epic and classical reception in contemporary women's writing. [4] Her first monograph, How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature, is (as of 2022) forthcoming under contract with Princeton University Press. In it, Hauser aims to investigate the language of poetic production in classical literature, and its role in suppressing and marginalising female voices from antiquity. [12]
Hauser's novels also reflect her focus on women's narratives and how these can expand contemporary understanding of classical stories by providing new perspectives. [13]
Hauser's first novel, For the Most Beautiful, was published by Transworld (Penguin Random House) in 2016 and is the first in the 'Golden Apple' trilogy. [14] It retells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Krisayis, daughter of the Trojans' High Priest, and Briseis, a princess of Pedasus enslaved after her husband is killed by the Greeks. [14] The title comes from the inscription upon the Apple of Discord in Greek mythology, which Eris, the goddess of strife, offered as a gift at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, bringing about the Judgement of Paris and the Trojan War. [15]
Hauser has expressed the importance of women's voices and narratives to her work in a 2016 interview with Ancient History Encyclopedia (AHE). [16] In the interview, Hauser notes that the lack of female perspective in the Iliad often contributes to a dismissal of the tale as a mere war story focused on men.
One of Hauser's main motivations to write is to make the literature of antiquity accessible to those who have not yet encountered the classical world. [13] Hauser has stated that the background for her character building for Krisayis was supplemented by post-classical receptions of Chryseis, namely the Shakespearean depiction of Cressida. [13] Both Chaucer and Shakespeare's versions contributed to Hauser's interest in the confusion of Briseis and Chryseis in the medieval tradition. Hauser expands the narratives of the two women in her novel, developing the idea that "these are actually two facets of one woman who [is] experiencing the Trojan War from different perspectives." [13]
She has published two further books in the 'Golden Apple' trilogy: For the Winner (2017), which retells the story of Atalanta and her travels with the Argonauts, [14] and For the Immortal (2018), which follows Admete and her journey along with Heracles to recover the Belt of Hippolyta. Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, is also a major character in the narrative. [17]
Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams formerly attributed to Sappho are extant, but these are actually Hellenistic imitations of Sappho's style.
Greek literature dates back from the ancient Greek literature, beginning in 800 BC, to the modern Greek literature of today.
Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.
Anyte of Tegea was a Hellenistic poet from Tegea in Arcadia. Little is known of her life, but twenty-four epigrams attributed to her are preserved in the Greek Anthology, and one is quoted by Julius Pollux; nineteen of these are generally accepted as authentic. She introduced rural themes to the genre, which became a standard theme in Hellenistic epigrams. She is one of the nine outstanding ancient women poets listed by Antipater of Thessalonica in the Palatine Anthology. Her pastoral poetry may have influenced Theocritus, and her works were adapted by several later poets, including Ovid.
Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, the Theogony and Works and Days, constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods.
Praxilla, was a Greek lyric poet of the 5th century BC from Sicyon on the Gulf of Corinth. Five quotations attributed to Praxilla and three paraphrases from her poems survive. The surviving fragments attributed to her come from both religious choral lyric and drinking songs (skolia); the three paraphrases are all versions of myths. Various social contexts have been suggested for Praxilla based on this range of surviving works. These include that her poetry was in fact composed by two different authors, that Praxilla was a hetaira (courtesan), that she was a professional musician, or that the drinking songs derive from a non-elite literary tradition rather than being authored by a single writer.
Erinna was an ancient Greek poet. She is best known for her long poem The Distaff, a 300-line hexameter lament for her childhood friend Baucis, who had died shortly after her marriage. A large fragment of this poem was discovered in 1928 at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Along with The Distaff, three epigrams ascribed to Erinna are known, preserved in the Greek Anthology. Biographical details about Erinna's life are uncertain. She is generally thought to have lived in the first half of the fourth century BC, though some ancient traditions have her as a contemporary of Sappho; Telos is generally considered to be her most likely birthplace, but Tenos, Teos, Rhodes, and Lesbos are all also mentioned by ancient sources as her home.
Nossis was a Hellenistic poet from Epizephyrian Locris in Magna Graecia. Probably well-educated and from a noble family, Nossis was influenced by and claimed to rival Sappho. Eleven or twelve of her epigrams, mostly religious dedications and epitaphs, survive in the Greek Anthology, making her one of the best-preserved ancient Greek women poets, though her work does not seem to have entered the Greek literary canon. In the twentieth century, the imagist poet H. D. was influenced by Nossis, as was Renée Vivien in her French translation of the ancient Greek women poets.
Rediscovering Homer is a 2006 book by Andrew Dalby. It sets out the problems of origin, dating and authorship of the two ancient Greek epics, Iliad and Odyssey, usually attributed to Homer.
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022, she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment. It can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.
Emily Rose Caroline Wilson is a British American classicist, author, translator, and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, she became the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer's Odyssey. Her translation of the Iliad was released in September 2023.
Armand D'Angour is a British classical scholar and classical musician, Professor of Classics at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. His research embraces a wide range of areas across ancient Greek culture, and has resulted in publications that contribute to scholarship on ancient Greek music and metre, innovation in ancient Greece, Latin and Greek lyric poetry, the biography of Socrates and the status of Aspasia of Miletus. He writes poetry in ancient Greek and Latin, and was commissioned to compose odes in ancient Greek verse for the 2004 and 2012 Olympic Games.
The Tithonus poem, also known as the old age poem or the New Sappho, is a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho. It is part of fragment 58 in Eva-Maria Voigt's edition of Sappho. The poem is from Book IV of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry. It was first published in 1922, after a fragment of papyrus on which it was partially preserved was discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt; further papyrus fragments published in 2004 almost completed the poem, drawing international media attention. One of very few substantially complete works by Sappho, it deals with the effects of ageing. There is scholarly debate about where the poem ends, as four lines previously thought to have been part of the poem are not found on the 2004 papyrus.
Judith P. Hallett is Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emerita of Classics, having formerly been the Graduate Director at the Department of Classics, University of Maryland. Her research focuses on women, the family, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, particularly in Latin literature. She is also an expert on classical education and reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Yopie Prins is the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her fields of research include classical reception, comparative literature, historical poetics, lyric theory, translation studies, Nineteenth-Century poetry, English Hellenism, and Victorian poetry.
Page DuBois is professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is known for her work in Ancient Greek literature, feminist theory and psychoanalysis.
Fiona McHardy is a Professor of Classics and also the Head of History and Classics in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Roehampton. In 2003 she started work at Roehampton where she was responsible for building up the BA Classical Civilisation. Her research interests include ancient and modern Greek literature, folk poetry, anthropology and culture. She teaches modules on ancient Greek language, literature and culture.
Christopher Allan Stray is a British historian of classical scholarship and teaching.
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho is a book by the Canadian classicist and poet Anne Carson, first published in 2002. It contains a translation of the surviving works of the archaic Greek poet Sappho, with the Greek text on facing pages, based on Eva-Maria Voigt's 1971 critical edition. Carson's translation closely follows the word-order of Sappho's Greek, and marks lacunae in the manuscripts with square brackets. If Not, Winter was widely praised and is considered a significant modern translation of Sappho's work.