This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can 'speak the unspeakable' and empower their subjects as well as themselves.

ORIGINAL: This will be only the second book on Classica Africana that examines how African American writers appropriate western classical mythology (Patrice Rankine's is the first). Scholarship on African Americans and the classics is underdeveloped (or ignored) because traditionally discussions about mythology and African American literature center on how African Americans appropriate African and African American mythology. We must begin recognizing the relevance of the classics and African American literature because a significant number of highly recognized African American writers (Phillis Wheatley, Countee Cullen, Pauline Hopkins, WEB Du Bois, Leon Forrest, Robert Hayden, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison and Rita Dove) - many of whom are included in my study - have been influenced by Greek and Roman mythology and this fact has been overlooked by most scholars. Furthermore, this study forces classicists to move beyond their traditional focus of study and broaden their approach to classical scholarship to include the perspectives of those who work in the sub field of Classica Africana

Writing the Classics Black: The Poetic and Political Function of Classical Revision in the Works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove Historical Overview of Ancient and Contemporary Representations of Classical Mythology Classical Discourse as Political Agency: African-American Revisionist Mythmaking by Phillis Wheatley, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and Pauline Hopkins Gwendolyn Brooks' Racialization of the Persephone and Demeter Myth Toni Morrison's Classical Fusion Rita Dove's Mother Love: A Return to Form