Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination.(Persephone Rises, 1860-1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality)(Book review)

Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination, by Shanyn Fiske; pp. ix + 262. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008, $39.95, 35.95 [pounds sterling].

Persephone Rises, 1860-1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality, by Margot K. Louis; pp. xiv + 171. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, 55.00 [pounds sterling], $99.95.

"We are all Greeks," writes Percy Bysshe Shelley in the preface to Hellas (1822), "Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece" (The Major Works, edited by Zachary Leader and Michael O'Neill [Oxford, 2008], 549). Long associated with a male social and intellectual elite, Hellenism in the Victorian period has more recently been understood as a pervasive phenomenon, sometimes radically opposed to the values of the establishment. Critics have examined subversive revisions of canonical materials by classically educated aesthetes, appropriations of Greek tragedy that enabled women writers to articulate rage and despair, and burlesque versions of Homer and Sophocles on the popular stage. Shanyn Fiske's Heretical Hellenism and Margot K. Louis's Persephone Rises continue this recent trend and significantly advance our understanding of the Victorian reception of ancient Greece. The reworkings of Greek myth examined here challenge conceptions of Victorian religion, gender, and sexuality. Louis explores the impact of a single mythological figure, Persephone, on British and North American literature in the late Victorian period and the early twentieth century. Fiske finds diverse examples of Greek literature and …