Meghji, Jasmine Alexandra;
(2025)
Phenomenological Approaches to the Reception of Homer in Contemporary Women's Writing.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis takes a phenomenological approach to the reception of Homer in three twenty-first century English novels, which I refer to as Homeric novelizations, by women authors: Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles (2001), Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), and Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018). While these contemporary works differ in style, subject, and stance toward their classical intertexts, they are united in their efforts to expand upon the gendered and embodied experiences of epic characters, especially women characters. In this thesis, I recognize the novelizations’ shared commitment to exploring gendered lived experience. I argue that feminist phenomenology, which similarly seeks to describe individual and gendered consciousness, offers a valuable theoretical framework through which to analyze the novelizations and their relationship to the Homeric epics. This thesis contains four chapters. Chapter 1 offers a detailed reading of the early, feminist, and hermeneutic branches of phenomenology and advocates for a phenomenological reading of the novelizations. In Chapter 2 I argue, with specific attention to the topics of genre, narrative technique, voice, and authorship, that the novelizations are phenomenological in both form and content. Chapter 3 springs from the phenomenological premise that gendered experience is fluid and ambiguous: I show that the novelizations represent this fluidity and ambiguity through the language and imagery of water. The centrality of the body to lived experience and to phenomenological enquiry inspires Chapter 4, in which I explore the relationship between gesture and spatiotemporal lived experience in the selected novelizations and the role of the moving body in the process of reception. These four chapters contribute in their own way to the overarching project of this thesis to examine gendered subjectivity in the selected novelizations and to make sense of the relationship between ancient epic and contemporary novelization.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Phenomenological Approaches to the Reception of Homer in Contemporary Women's Writing |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Greek and Latin |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206610 |
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