Reading Sappho
Edited by Ellen Greene
Abstract: In this volume, scholarship on Sappho moves beyond a limiting focus on textual reconstruction or analysis of her possible biography to study her as a powerful and influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. Many of the essays presented here mark a turning point in Sappho scholarship, an efflorescence of literary and contextual criticism in which scholars read Sappho’s poetry for its literary content and its relation to literary and mythical tradition. The move to assimilate methodologies from other branches of literary and cultural studies is evident, and feminist scholarship and work on gender theory are represented. The aim of this collection is to draw well-deserved attention to Sappho’s importance as a poet and to offer a sense of the lively debate and competing critical positions within Sappho studies.
Sappho’s amatory language / Giuliana Lanata — Critical stereotypes and the poetry of Sappho / Mary R. Lefkowitz — Phaethon, Sappho’s Phaon, and the white rock of Leukas / Gregory Nagy — Eros and incantation / Charles Segal — Sappho and Helen / Page duBois — Gardens of nymphs / Jack Winkler — Sappho’s group / Claude Calame — Sappho and her social context / Judith P. Hallett — Romantic sensuality, poetic sense / Eva Stehle — Who sang Sappho’s songs? / André Lardinois — Women and language in archaic Greece, or, Why is Sappho a woman? / Marilyn B. Skinner — Sappho’s gaze / Eva Stehle — Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho I / Anne Carson — Apostrophe and women’s erotics in the poetry of Sappho / Ellen Greene — Sappho and the other woman / Margaret Williamson.
Published 1996 by University of California Press