Victorian Sappho Book

A remarkable new addition to the fields of gender studies, classical studies, and modern poetics, Victorian Sappho sends off many casually brilliant sparks, with a broad appeal that easily transcends disciplines. "Invoked as a lyric muse in antiquity and mythologised for posterity by Ovid," Sappho has always been "a figment of the literary imagination." Prins traces the 19th-century recovery of new fragments of Sappho's poems and the allure they held for classical philologists, who attempted to piece together not only her lyrics but her absent, impossible self: the feminine voice and the female body. In scholarly writing, as well as the work of Swinburne and countless popular poets like Felicia Hemans, Sappho eventually came to embody the Victorian definition of the lyric. The era's fascination with the "incomplete" Sappho carried over to this century in the modernist idealisation of the fragment. Engaging scholarship--the introduction alone establishes Prins as a strong and subtle thinker--and gorgeously written. --Regina Marler, Amazon.comRead More