Overview

Advocating a revised history of the eighteenth-century novel, Novel Cleopatras showcases the novel's origins in ancient mythology, its relation to epic narrative, and its connection to neoclassical print culture. Novel Cleopatras also rewrites the essential role of women writers in history who were typically underestimated as active participants of neoclassical culture, often excluded from the same schools that taught their brothers Greek and Latin. However, as author Nicole Horejsi reveals, a number of exceptional middle-class women were actually serious students of the classics. In order to dismiss the idea that women were completely marginalized as neoclassical writers, Horejsi takes up the character of Dido from ancient Greek mythology and her real-life counterpart Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt. Together, the legendary Dido and historical Cleopatra serve as figures for the conflation of myth and history. Horejsi contends that turning to the doomed queens who haunted the Roman imagination enabled eighteenth-century novelists to seize the productive overlap among the categories of history, romance, the novel, and even the epic.

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9781442647145

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"""This book is by no means the last word on the topics of eighteenth-century fiction, women’s writing, and the use of epic or myth, nor does it claim to be. It stands, rather, as a mark of the vibrancy of these interconnected fields. As such, it should be read by all who are interested in the fiction of the eighteenth century, with all its complexities, and in all its incarnations."" -- Gillian Dow, University of Southampton * <em>Eighteenth-Century Fiction</em> *"

Novel Cleopatras is a persuasive and intelligent work which makes the case that classical precedents are not put aside with the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, but rather complicated and re-appropriated to produce new mythologies from old traditions. Nicole Horejsi also demonstrates that women writers, rather than remaining ignorant of classical models, were instrumental in this process of shaping a 'new' neo-classicism. - Rosalind Ballaster, Faculty of English, Mansfield College, University of Oxford Novel Cleopatras is a valuable scholarly argument about uses of Dido and Cleopatra stories in the eighteenth century as part of the ongoing discussion surrounding the conception of the novel, the instability of generic categories, and the attitudes towards the classics as literature became more inclusive. - Tanya Caldwell, Professor, Department of English, Georgia State University

Author Information

Nicole Horejsi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at California State University in Los Angeles.

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