Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading

Melissa Mueller

12/2023 · Cambridge University Press

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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.

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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.