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In this book, Melissa Mueller brings two of the most celebrated poets from Greek antiquity into conversation with contemporary theorists of gender, sexuality, and affect studies. Like all lyric poets of her time, Sappho was steeped in the affects and story-world of Homeric epic, and the language, characters, and themes of her poetry often intersect with those of Homer. Yet the relationship between Sappho and Homer has usually been framed as competitive and antagonistic. This book instead sets the two side by side, within the embrace of a non-hierarchical, 'reparative reading' culture, as first conceived by queer theorist and poet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Reintroducing readers to a Sappho who supplements Homer's vision, it is an approach that locates Sappho's lyrics at the center of timely discussions about materiality, shame, queer failure, and the aging body, while presenting a sustaining and collaborative way of reading both lyric and epic.
List of contents
Introduction: A Colicky Muse; Part I. Reparative Reading: 1. Reparative Intertextualities: Sappho and Homer Between Lesbos and Troy; 2. Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers; Part II. Sappho and Homer: 3. Plaiting and Poikilia: the Materialities of Sappho's Craft; 4. Aphrodite and the Poetics of Shame; 5. In the Bardo with Tithonos; 6. Sappho fr. 44V, or Andromache's 'No Future' Wedding Song; 7. Sappho's Third Alternative: Helen and the Queering of Epic Desire; 8. Sapphic Remembering, Lyric Kleos; Epilogue: Homer's Night, Sappho's Day; Appendix: On the Absence of the newest Sappho fragments from this book.
About the author
MELISSA MUELLER is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (2016), co-editor of The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (2018), and series co-editor of Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms for Edinburgh University Press.
