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Stories of violence and oppression from classical mythology and fairy tales are redeployed in two novels by Atwood (1985) and Atkinson (1997) as archetypal pre-texts that impact on plot and narrative process. Although they are very different in genre and theme, both novels present first-person female narrators who are trapped in a claustrophobic present, and pose the question of the extent to which a story can be told from within the boundaries traced by myth, fairy tales and quasi-mythical literary texts. Clearly indebted to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a dystopian world where women live segregated by a male regime. References to the tale of Little Red Cap, classical myths and ceremonies are embedded in the text and reveal the story as a narrative that replicates the oppressive structure in which the female protagonist is imprisoned. On the other hand, Atkinson’s Human Croquet is a metafictional family saga where Ovidian imagery, fairy tales and Shakespearean texts shape throughout the hyperliterate narrator’s vision of the world, leaving her (and the reader) with a sense of inescapable and at times threatening déjà-vu. Besides the connections between myths of violence and plots, the essay will highlight the structuring principle of repetition, which in both works emerges as a form of epistemic violence that tragically questions or diminishes the narrative voice.

Il romanzo in versi The Emperor's Babe (2001) di Bernardine Evaristo racconta la storia di Zuleika, figlia di due immigrati dalla Nubia, che vive nell'antica Londra romana all'inizio del III sec. d.C. Evaristo usa sia fonti classiche – poesia, proverbi, motti latini, miti, e cultura materiale – sia moderne, come Oscar Wilde, la cui concezione della storia informa l'intento revisionista del romanzo. L'articolo intende esaminare il ruolo delle citazioni e degli echi intertestuali nello sviluppo della trama e nella dialettica tra passato e presente. Se apparentemente essi contribuiscono a ricreare lo sfondo culturale antico, a un livello più profondo producono scarti ironici o effetti parodistici nel contrasto tra toni, stili e situazioni. Inoltre, in considerazione della voce narrante, gendered e subalterna, essi si rivelano un aspetto cruciale di quell'intento di riscrittura della storia che Evaristo compie in questo romanzo: sovrapponendo la Londra post-imperiale e multiculturale odierna alla città romana, The Emperor's Babe sovverte il mito della nazione alle sue origini. Bernardine Evaristo's novel in verse The Emperor's Babe (2001) features the story of Zuleika, the daughter of Nubian immigrants, who lives in Roman London at the beginning of the third century A.D.. Evaristo's sources are both classical – Latin poetry, proverbs, mottos, myths, as well as material culture – and modern – for example, Oscar Wilde's perspective on history informs the revisionist intent of the novel. This article aims to examine the role of quotations and intertextual echoes in the development of the storyline and in the dialectic between past and present. If apparently they contribute to the recreation of the ancient cultural background, at a deeper level, they also engender ironic tensions and parodic effects through discrepancies in tone, style and narrative situations. Moreover, in relation to the protagonist's gendered and subaltern position, quotations and other references are a crucial aspect of Evaristo's rewriting of history: by mapping today's post-imperial and multicultural London on to the Roman city, The Emperor's Babe subverts the myth of the nation at its roots.

Il presente lavoro di tesi si inserisce nell’ambito dei Classical Reception Studies e tratta nello specifico di un aspetto della ricezione ovidiana. Lo studio prende in esame un corpus di riscritture inglesi del mito di Tereo, Procne e Filomela narrato nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio (met. 6, 424-674). Si delinea dapprima la ricezione pre-novecentesca del mito, che comprende sia autori canonici come Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, i vittoriani Arnold e Swinburne, sia autori meno noti. La seconda parte del lavoro è intesa come premessa teorica e critica alle riscritture del secondo Novecento, ma si pone più in generale come obiettivo quello di esaminare la fortuna letteraria e critica delle Metamorfosi ovidiane nel tardo Novecento, che ha visto un rinnovarsi dell’interesse verso l’autore, in particolare nell’ambito del postmodernismo. Speciale attenzione è data al genere della riscrittura e a un corpus di testi critici femministi che rileggono il mito e la figura di Filomela. La terza parte dello studio prende in esame quattro riscritture ad opera di autrici a partire dagli anni Settanta, e si chiude soffermandosi sulla fortuna di Filomela in ambito anglofono. This dissertation deals with a branch of Classical Reception Studies, the lively field of the Ovidian reception. The study examines a wide corpus of English rewritings of the myth of Philomela, Tereus and Procne which is told in the Metamorphoses (6, 424-624). The first part is devoted to the pre-twentieth-century reception of the myth, which includes both canonical authors, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and the Victorian poets Arnold and Swinburne, and less known writers. The second part provides a theoretical and critical premise for the rewritings of the late twentieth century, but it also aims to examine the literary and critical reception of Ovid’s poem in the second half of the century, which saw a renewed interest in the ancient poet, especially in the field of postmodernist literature. Special attention is paid to the genre of rewriting and to a corpus of feminist critical texts that re-read the figure of Philomela. The third part of the dissertation analyses four rewritings by female authors from the 70s onwards, ending with a section on the reception of the figure of Philomela in English-speaking works.