Ancient Texts, Contemporary Voices

This study approaches myths as patriarchal narratives and ideological tools and it argues that representations of women from an androcentric perspective in Greek mythology are also observed in the Bible. It maintains that patriarchy as an ideology has produced the same gender stereotypes beginning from Ancient Greece. Consequently, Western literature, which has the Classical and Biblical tradition as its main source, has reinforced the same female images throughout its history. Besides, it is suggested that the Western canon failed to create alternative female models and the main stereotypical characteristics had not been challenged for centuries. This book thus aims to discuss myths as one of the foremost sites of ideological subject construction and it analyses the rewritings of Greek, Old Testament and New Testament myths by contemporary women writers in fiction and it explores the textual strategies that are employed by writers in order to subvert and revise the patriarchal ideology in myths to come up with alternative definitions of female identity and to weave gynocentric myths.