Modernist women and the Greek chorus Laura McClure

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McClure, Laura, 1959- author.

Series:

Classical presences

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886-1961.

H. D.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, 1850-1928.

Harrison, Jane Ellen.

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941.

Woolf, Virginia.

Drama--Chorus (Greek drama).

Drama.

Drama--Chorus (Greek drama)--Influence.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

illustration

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford New York, NY Oxford University Press [2026]

Summary:

The disappearance of the chorus after antiquity, along with its association with female marginality, lyricism, and ritual authority in the Athenian drama that preserved it, rendered it an enigmatic vestige of the Greek past that invited innovative receptions by women from the early twentieth century onward. This book traces a feminine, and feminist, genealogy of the chorus from archaic Greece to the 1930s, focusing on three anglophone women whose work was profoundly shaped by it: the classicist Jane Harrison (1850-1928), the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and the poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), known as H.D. All three women were drawn to the chorus as the most elusive and unknowable aspect of Greek drama, envisioning it as fundamentally feminine in origin and identifying with its marginality, lyric power, and ritual authority

Contents:

Cover

Modernist Women and the Greek Chorus

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction

The Chorus in Ancient Greece

Classical Reception and Modern Hellenism

Modernist Women and Hellenism

Outline of Chapters

1: Maidens and Maenads

The Greek Chorus Defined

Alcman, Partheneion Fr. 1

Maenadic Choruses

Male Choral Culture in Classical Athens

Female Chorality in Greek Tragedy

Choral Temporalities and Topographies

Euripides and the Dithyrambic Turn

Choral Migrations

Conclusion

2: Post-Classical Choralities

The Reinvention of Greece

The Rebirth of the Chorus

Nietzsche and the Ritual Chorus of Satyrs

Victorian Hellenism

Antiquities at the British Museum

Decadent Hellenism

"The Feminine of Homer"

Greek Plays at Universities

3: Jane Harrison and the Maenadic Chorus

The Spell of Greek

Studies in Greek Art and Archaeology

A Disciple of Nietzsche

A Minoan Epiphany

A Vase in Verse

Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

Daughters of the Earth

"Possessed, Magical, and Dangerous to Handle"

Themis: The Social Fact of the Mother

The Maenads as Mothers

The Chorus in Ancient Art and Ritual

4: Choral Modalities in Virginia Woolf's Writings

Choral Appropriations

Greek Lessons

The Nymph and the Noun

Reading and Rereading Greek Plays

"On Not Knowing Greek"

Choral Voices in Mrs. Dalloway

The Waves as Choral Novel

A Song in Four Voices: The Years

The Matriarchal Chorus

Reading Antigone

The Strange Beauty of Modernity

5: H.D.'s Choros Sequence: Experiments in Poetic Form

Choros and the Greek Sequence

Ezra Pound: "The Scorpionic Sting"

Reading Greek in the British Museum

Euripides: "The White Rose"

Greek Meters and Free Verse

Experimenting with Choral Cadences

The Third Stasimon of Euripides' Helen

Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and Hippolytus

Ion : A Play after Euripides

Helen in Egypt : A Choros Sequence

Postscript

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on May 14, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version :

ISBN:

9780191991868

0191991864

9780198883722

0198883722

OCLC:

1583719955

Publisher Number:

CIPO000373945

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license