Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho

by Jane McIntosh Snyder

Overview

— Choice

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231099943
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	03/25/1997
Series:	Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies
Pages:	278
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.38(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jane McIntosh Snyder is professor emeritus of classics at the Ohio State University.

What People are Saying About This

Helene Foley

Snyder offers a comprehensive treatment of Sappho's poetry for the Greekless reader, including transliterations and translations of the Greek. She elucidates Sappho's representation of female desire and her influence on modern American women poets.

— Helene Foley, author of Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Editorial Reviews

What emerges in this careful and engaging study is an explication of Sappho's work and its literary environment, which illuminates both Sappho and the ways she has been read, adopted, and co-opted over the centuries. Without polemics, and with scrupulous candor and fidelity to the originals, Snyder allows even those readers who are, as she puts it, 'Greekless' to find their connection with the vitality of the words and the poems, which often exist on the page in only the most fragmentary form. By returning often to the bits of text that contain key words and phrases, Snyder actually succeeds in intimating poems where only hints remain.

Choice

Snyder offers a comprehensive treatment of Sappho's poetry for the Greekless reader, including transliterations and translations of the Greek. She elucidates Sappho's representation of female desire and her influence on modern American women poets.

Helene Foley

Focuses on the active female gaze in the ancient Greek poetry to show how female experiences and desires were primary and not secondary to dominant male culture. Close readings demonstrate how Sappho's lyrics emphasize women's emotional lives with one another and female erotic desire for other females. An appendix contains the original Greek of the translated poems and fragments. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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