Re-viewing the Classics: Phillis Wheatley’s African muse

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i8.11496
Keywords: American poetry, Classicism, signifying, re-writing/revision, African American literature

Abstract

Phillis Wheatley’s poetry drew from the classics in its celebration of the republican ideals that would lay the foundation of the nascent United States. Revising this tradition, her verse highlighted the profound contradictions engendered by the coexistence of those principles with the system of slavery. The article highlights the creative and covertly revolutionary scope of Wheatley’s rewritings focusing on an epillion inspired by a passage from Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Richard Wilson’s pictorial transposition.

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Author Biography

Sabrina Vellucci, Roma Tre University

Sabrina Vellucci is an associate professor of American Literature at Roma Tre University. She has published articles and essays on American women’s writing, twentieth-century U.S. poetry, theater, cinema, and adaptation (literature to film). She recently co-edited a special issue of the Italian American Review (University of Illinois Press, 2023) and translated and edited Anna Cora Mowatt’s 1845 play, Fashion; or, Life in New York (Linea Edizioni, 2023). Her volume Italian American Poetics of Place: An Environmental Perspective was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (2024).

Published
2024-12-28
How to Cite
VellucciS. (2024). Re-viewing the Classics: Phillis Wheatley’s African muse. SigMa - Rivista Di Letterature Comparate, Teatro E Arti Dello Spettacolo, (8), 425-445. https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i8.11496
Issue
No 8 (2024): Simultaneity and polyphony. Choir voices in contemporary drama and the arts
Section
Varia

Copyright (c) 2024 Sabrina Vellucci

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