Samantha Lepak

Modernism’s Mythic Mothers: Queering Motherhood Through Classical Matrilineage

I position this dissertation at the intersection of modern/contemporary literature, queer/feminist theory, and classics in the hopes of better understanding the spaces in which they meet, engaging with writers from the late modernist era to the present to highlight the connections between theories, themes, and practices of queerness from the modernists forward.  Using the work of H.D. and writers following in her footsteps, I argue that exploring adaptations of Greek classics written primarily by female and gender-variant authors from the modernist era forward illuminates the extent to which the classics enables writers to think queerly.  I argue instead for a palimpsestic model of lineage that follows women and mothers in order to queer the discourse with a subverted temporal perspective and focus.