Ruth MacDonald's Report

I work primarily in the field of classical reception studies, examining the ways in which later cultures receive and interact with the ancient world. I have recently undertaken a PhD in the Classics department at Royal Holloway, University of London entitled:  'Classical Reception, Feminist Theory and Creative Practice: Rethinking the Homeric Hero in Contemporary British Women's Writing'. My thesis engages with receptions of Homeric masculinity in the work of Elizabeth Cook, Gwyneth Lewis and Kate Tempest and examines the ways in which their responses to the classics are underpinned by a renewed confidence in the body as displayed by contemporary feminist thinking.  My research thus simultaneously explores the literary tropes and philosophical inspirations of fourth-wave feminism, while also mapping the increasing contemporary trend to rework the classics.

In the final year of my PhD, I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Santander Travel Award in order to conduct archive research on two authors whose work I was examining in my thesis, Gwyneth Lewis and Elizabeth Cook.  Very little research has been done on these two authors, in spite of their increasing visibility and significance in contemporary culture. As a result, I feel that my research is a timely exploration of their writing more generally and their responses to established understandings of ancient heroics and masculinity more specifically.

The Santander Travel Award enabled me to undertake two three-day research trips to the Archive of Gwyneth Lewis at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the Elizabeth Cook Correspondence and Papers Archive at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, in March and April of 2016. The archives are comprised of large volumes relating to the authors' creative practice, including earlier drafts of their work, research materials, materials relating to performance history, unpublished poems, as well as correspondence with publishers, academics and other writers. In this way, the travel award gave me the opportunity to examine vital evidence that I otherwise would not have had access to.

The Santander Travel Award provided me with a vital opportunity which has enhanced my textual analysis through adding depth to my previous work. Following my examination of these materials, I was able to complement and support my previous findings with regards to the texts and writers under study. As such, the materials collected in these institutions helped me to further contextualize Lewis's A Hospital Odyssey (2010) and Cook's Achilles (2002) within broader currents of feminist thought and classical reception, as well as offering additional insight into the authors' creative processes.