Examining the appropriation of transgressive, violent female figures from ancient Greek literature and myth by late Victorian writers, Olverson reveals the extent to which ancient antagonists like the murderous Medea and the sinister Circe were employed as a means to protest against and comment upon contemporary social and political institutions.

Examining popular contexts of Greek revivalism associated with women, Comet challenges the masculine narrative of English Classicism by demonstrating that it thrived in non-male spaces, as an ephemeral ideal that betrayed a distrust of democratic rhetoric that ignored the social inequities of the classical world.

Heretical Hellenism examines sources such as theater history and popular journals to uncover the ways women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy and challenged traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women's place in literary history.

Women Writing Greece explores images of modern Greece by women who experienced the country as travellers, writers, and scholars, or who journeyed there through the imagination. The essays assembled here consider women's travel narratives, memoirs and novels, ranging from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, focusing on the role of gender in travel and cross-cultural mediation and challenging stereotypical views of 'the Greek journey', traditionally seen as an antiquarian or Byronic pursuit. This collection aims to cast new light on women's participation in the discourses of Hellenism and Orientalism, examining their ideological rendering of Greece as at once a luminous land and a site crossed by contradictory cultural memories. Arranged chronologically, the essays discuss encounters with Greece by, among others, Lady Elizabeth Craven, Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Montagu, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley, Felicia Skene, Emily Pfeiffer, Eva Palmer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, Christa Wolf, Penelope Storace and Gillian Bouras, and analyse them through a variety of critical, historical, contextual and theoretical frames.

Focusing on British women writers' knowledge of ancient Egypt, Youngkin shows the oftentimes limited but pervasive representations of ancient Egyptian women in their written and visual works. Images of Hathor, Isis, and Cleopatra influenced how British writers such as George Eliot and Edith Cooper came to represent female emancipation.

In Ladies' Greek, Yopie Prins illuminates a culture of female classical literacy that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the formation of women's colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. Why did Victorian women of letters desire to learn ancient Greek, a "dead" language written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they wrote "some Greek upon the margin—lady's Greek, without the accents." Yet in the margins of classical scholarship they discovered other ways of knowing, and not knowing, Greek. Mediating between professional philology and the popularization of classics, these passionate amateurs became an important medium for classical transmission. Combining archival research on the entry of women into Greek studies in Victorian England and America with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy, Prins demonstrates how women turned to this genre to perform a passion for ancient Greek, full of eros and pathos. She focuses on five tragedies—Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae—to analyze a wide range of translational practices by women and to explore the ongoing legacy of Ladies' Greek. Key figures in this story include Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf, Janet Case and Jane Harrison, Edith Hamilton and Eva Palmer, and A. Mary F. Robinson and H.D. The book also features numerous illustrations, including photographs of early performances of Greek tragedy at women's colleges. The first comparative study of Anglo-American Hellenism, Ladies' Greek opens up new perspectives in transatlantic Victorian studies and the study of classical reception, translation, and gender.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (on 'Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology', 'Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief', and 'Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures', the volume is sub-divided into 9 sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students and established scholars.