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From Latin love poetry’s dominating and enslaving beloveds, to modern popular culture’s infamous Cleopatras and Messalinas, representations of the Roman mistress (or the mistress of Romans) have brought into question both ancient and modern genders and political systems. The Roman Mistress explores representations of transgressive women in Latin love poetry and British television drama, in Roman historiography and nineteenth-century Italian anthropology, on classical coinage and college websites, as poetic metaphor and in the Hollywood star system. In a highly accessible style, the book makes an important and original contribution simultaneously to feminist scholarship on antiquity, the classical tradition, and cultural studies.

In the first full-length study of Shakespeare's Roman plays, Coppélia Kahn brings to these texts a startling, critical perspective which interrogates the gender ideologies lurking behind 'Roman virtue'. Plays featured include: * Titus Andronicus * Julius Caesar * Antony and Cleopatra * Coriolanus * Cymbeline Setting the Roman works in the dual context of the popular theatre and Renaissance humanism, the author identifies new sources which she analyzes from a historicised feminist perspective. Roman Shakespeare is written in an accessible style and will appeal to scholars and students of Shakespeare and those interested in feminist theory, as well as classicists.

This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century b.c.e. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressed-thedocta puella,or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writers-as plaint and confession-but rather from the viewpoint of the women-thus as persuasion and attempted manipulation-James reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before.

This article analyses The History of the Seven Wise Mistrisses of Rome, attributed to Thomas Howard, and traditionally underrated by literary critics and historians as a mere imitation of the Seven Sages, despite its enormous success. The early parts examine the literary and editorial relationship with its source text, and Howard’s prefatory “Epistle.” The latter parts concentrate on the frame story and the fifteen exemplary tales. Special attention is drawn to the gender/feminist issues in the original extension of the frame story, and to the folktale motifs displayed in this compilation, stylistically and thematically conceived to help children improve their reading competence.

In her feminization of Hawthorne’s famous Italian tales, Alcott made of her talented heroines not only objects but subjects of their art. The excellent training of many of her aspiring women sculptors follows the Oedipal patterns which oppressively dominate Nathaniel Hawthorne’s own Roman artworld. Being victimized by a Puritan ideal of beauty that no living body could equal, Alcott’s feminized versions of The Marble Faun allude to the American colony of women sculptors led by the actress Charlotte Cushman, whose extraordinary accomplishments in the arts challenged the patriarchal demands of the male gaze.

The series of novels and the film, The Hunger Games, presents Katniss Everdeen, a female protagonist, and her journeys through an impoverished, dystopian future world. This review, in the form of a mother-daughter conversation, examines the way the books deal with extreme forms of violence by young people and the treatment of violence in our current culture. We note the historical resonances and possible predictions for the future that the book might offer us. We examine gender and sexuality as it is reflected in the main character, Katniss, and what Katniss, as protagonist, embodies as perhaps a new and developed female character in young adult literature.

Hallett describes Roman women's writings and its attributes in the Roman literature. Latin texts furnish incontrovertible proof that women of advantaged but by no means elite and noble background, living far from the imperial capital, communicated in elegant, emotion-packed, and literarily flavored Latin.

Love Between Women examines female homoeroticism and the role of women in the ancient Roman world. Employing an unparalleled range of cultural sources, Brooten finds evidence of marriages between women and establishes that condemnations of female homoerotic practices were based on widespread awareness of love between women.

Lucrece tells a story about possession and dispossession. The woman at the centre of the narrative is treated as the proper possession of her husband – or perhaps her father: propriety evidently defines women as property in Shakespeare's Rome. But possessions can be expropriated and property owners may be dispossessed. Tarquin takes improper possession of the faithful wife of his comrade-in-arms on the basis of an irresistible desire and, thus possessed, in the distinctive sense that he is impelled to act against his own judgement, Tarquin loses his self-possession and, as a result, his identity as friend, kinsman, prince, Roman lord. At the last, publicly exposed, shamed by Lucrece's suicide, and driven in consequence from what was his proper place in Rome, along with the entire royal family that has taken possession of the city, Tarquin is doubly dispossessed by a woman's constancy.Recent criticism is divided on the sexual politics of the poem. Reacting incisively against those male readers who had followed St Augustine to find Lucretia guilty of vainglory or, worse, colluding with her own rape, critics influenced by feminism have predominantly seen Shakespeare's Lucrece as, instead, the victim of patriarchal values, whether the passive object of a struggle between men, or complicit in her suicide with masculine misogyny. A minority of other equally feminist arguments, however, powerfully defend her as an exemplum of female virtue, or hold her up as a model of resistance to patriarchy.