Tender Girl Song

Songs in God's World

Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece

Through a balanced discussion of poetry as performance, relevant kinds and genres of poetry, the definition and scope of "woman's song" as a mode, partheneia (maidens' songs) and the girls' chorus, lyric in the drama, echoes and imitations of archaic woman's song in Hellenistic poetry, and inferences about the differences between male and female authors, Klinck demonstrates that woman's song is ultimately best understood as the product of a male-dominated culture but that feminine stereotypes, while refined by skilful male poets, are interrogated and shifted by female poets.

Learned Girls and Male Persuasion

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—the docta 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.