Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth

Myths reflect, reinforce, and sometimes subvert gender ideologies and so have an influence in the 'real world'. This is true in the present no less than when the Greek and Roman myths were created. The struggles to redefine gender roles and identities in our own time are inevitably reflected in our interpretations and retellings of these classical myths. Using the new lenses provided by gender studies and diverse forms of feminism, Lillian Doherty re-examines some of the major approaches to myth interpretation in the twentieth century: psychological, ritualist, 'charter', structuralist and folklorist. She also explores 'popular' uses of classical mythology - from television and comic books to the evocation of goddesses in Jungian psychology.

Lillian Doherty is Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland and the author of Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (1995).

Susanna Morton Braund is Professor of Latin Poetry and Its Reception at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She has published extensively on Roman satire, Latin epic poetry and Seneca, including for Bloomsbury The Roman Satirists and Their Masks (1998).

Paul Cartledge is A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University, UK, and a Fellow of Clare College. He has published extensively on Greek history over several decades, including The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece (1997, new edition 2002), Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (2004, revised edition 2005), Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (2009), and Democracy: A Life (2016).