Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece

By considering women's voices in performance, Anne Klinck provides a new perspective on women's "writing." She shows that our understanding of femininity in ancient Greece can be expanded by going beyond poetry composed by women poets like Sappho to explore girls' and women's choral songs from the archaic period, songs for female choruses and characters in tragedy, and lyrical representations of women's rituals and cults.Through a balanced discussion of poetry as performance, relevant kinds and genres of poetry, the definition and scope of "woman's song" as a mode, partheneia (maidens' songs) and the girls' chorus, lyric in the drama, echoes and imitations of archaic woman's song in Hellenistic poetry, and inferences about the differences between male and female authors, Klinck demonstrates that woman's song is ultimately best understood as the product of a male-dominated culture but that feminine stereotypes, while refined by skilful male poets, are interrogated and shifted by female poets.Arranged in more-or-less chronological order, the chapters contain three sections: an introduction to the author(s), poems or passages in the original Greek accompanied by line-for-line translations in free verse, and notes elucidating the text, its provenance, allusions, and textual difficulties. Beginning with Alcman, going on to Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, other lyric poets, lyric in the drama, and then the Hellenistic poets Nossis, Theocritus, and Bion, Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece traces the evolution of female-voice lyric from 600 to 100 BCE.