How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature (2023, Princeton)
How the idea of the author was born in the battleground of gender…
When Sappho sang her songs, the only word that existed to describe a poet was a male one—aoidos, or “singer-man.” The most famous woman poet of ancient Greece, whose craft was one of words, had no words with which to talk about who she was and what she did. In How Women Became Poets, Emily Hauser rewrites the story of Greek literature as one of gender, arguing that the ways the Greeks talked about their identity as poets constructed, played with, and broke down gender expectations that literature was for men alone. Bringing together recent studies in ancient authorship, gender, and performativity, Hauser offers a new history of classical literature that redefines the canon as a constant struggle to be heard through, and sometimes despite, gender.
Women, as Virginia Woolf recognized, need rooms of their own in order to write. So, too, have women writers through history needed a name to describe what it is they do. Hauser traces the invention of that name in ancient Greece, exploring the archaeology of the gendering of the poet. She follows ancient Greek poets, philosophers, and historians as they developed and debated the vocabulary for authorship on the battleground of gender—building up and reinforcing the word for male poet, then in response creating a language with which to describe women who write. Crucially, Hauser reinserts women into the traditionally all-male canon of Greek literature, arguing for the centrality of their role in shaping ideas around authorship and literary production.
Publications
BOOKS
How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
Bär, Silvio and Emily Hauser (eds.) Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship. Oxford, London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
ARTICLES
“Between Voice and Presence: Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia and Silence as Reception.” Classical Receptions Journal, forthcoming.
“Putting an End to Song: Penelope, Odysseus and the Teleologies of the Odyssey.” Helios 47 (1) (2020): 39–69.
“Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap: (Re-)Constructing Gender and Authorship through Sappho.” Synthesis 12 (2020): 55–75.
“When Classics Gets Creative: From Research to Practice.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 149 (2) (2019): 163–177. Online.
“ ‘There is another story’: Writing after the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad.” Classical Receptions Journal (2018) 10 (2): 109–26.
“In Her Own Words: The Semantics of Female Authorship in Ancient Greece, from Sappho to Nossis.” Ramus (2016) 45 (2): 133–64.
“Optima tu proprii nominis auctor: The Semantics of Female Authorship in Ancient Rome, from Sulpicia to Proba.” Eugesta (2016) 6: 151–86.
CHAPTERS
“Women in Homer.” In Emma Greensmith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Epic. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
“Making Men: Gender and the Poet in Pindar.” In Lisa Cordes and Therese Fuhrer (eds.) (2022) The Gender Parameter in the Shaping of First-Person Discourse in Classical Literature: Shaping a (Gendered) ‘I’ Persona. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 129–149.
Introduction to Ithaca Forever: Penelope Speaks – A Novel, translated by Douglas Grant Heise (2019). Berkeley: University of California Press, i–xvii.
“Introduction.” For Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship, edited by Silvio Bär and Emily Hauser, London: Bloomsbury, 1-12.
“‘Homer Undone’: Homeric Scholarship and the Invention of Female Epic.” For Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship, edited by Silvio Bär and Emily Hauser, London: Bloomsbury, 151-171.
REVIEWS AND TRANSLATIONS
Review of Dickison S. and J. Hallett, eds. (2015) A Roman Women Reader: Selections from the Second Century BCE through the Second Century CE. Mundelein IL: Bolchazy-Carducci. With Victoria Leonard. In Cloelia n.s. 5 (October 2015): available online.
Review of Karanika A. (2014) Voices at Work: Women, Performance and Labor in Ancient Greece. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. In Cloelia n.s. 4 (October 2014): available online.
Review of Graziosi B. and J. Haubold (2010) Homer: Iliad, Book VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In The Classical Review 63.1 (April 2013): 5-6.
Translation of Rousseau P. (2001) “L’Intrigue de Zeus,” in Europa 79: 120-158. Published as “The Plot of Zeus” on The Center for Hellenic Studies website, Harvard University (2011): available online.