Deliberately Out of Bounds ─ Women's Work on Classical Myth in Nineteenth-century American Fiction

Keck explores women's intellectual and aesthetic achievement in rewriting classical myth, and argues that myth itself is "logos" with as much potential to subvert as to confirm dominant cultural ideologies. Focusing on 19th-century American women's fiction, she discusses myth, pathos formulae, and women's revisionist myth-making; Dionysian frenzies in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's A New-England Tale; the trials of Psyche: ancient mysteries in Lydia Maria Child's Philothea; Jason and the Sphinx: Elizabeth Stoddard's discrepant New England mythologies; Isiac womanhood in Elizabeth Stuart Phelp's The Story of Avis; and Galatea's sufferings in Louise May Alcott's A Modern Mephistopheles. Annotation ©2018 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)