Exit Penelope: towards a lyric of her own in a post-68 world

This dissertation, Exit Penelope: Towards a Lyric of Her Own in a Post-68 World, examines the literary rewritings of the Homeric character of Penelope produced in the long aftermath of the global revolutions of 1968. Situated at the intersections of genre theory, feminist criticism, and classical reception studies, this work engages the scholarly debate about how to responsibly reimagine classical women characters originating in Greek myth. While previous studies have focused on revisions of Penelope in various literary genres, this thesis scrutinizes a specific trend emerging from the 1970s to the present day that attributes to the heroine a book/length lyric of her own. Using a comparativist and multifocal socio-formalist approach, I take into consideration a corpus of long poetic texts that grant Penelope a protagonist role and deploy her themes as way to dramatize different facets of the experience of waiting, desiring, and grieving in the contemporary world. The findings of this thesis demonstrate that greater attention to the long poem sequence offers a balance between narrative development and lyrical meditation in ways that help us trouble a binary form of representing the heroine as a stand-in either for the Good Waiting Woman archetype or as an underrecognized feminist trailblazer, allowing a more nuanced exploration of the character’s multivalent contradictions and its potential for dramatizing emerging configurations of subjectivity.