Abstract
Like several of her predecessors and contemporaries, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, writing in the 1820s and 30s, cultivated a lyrical persona on the model of the Ovidian Sappho, through which she fed the public’s appetite for tragic femininity and heart-wrenching narratives of unrequited love.1 Like Lucy Aikin, she invested her poetry with a keen understanding of ancient history, especially the social history of women. And like Felicia Hemans, she complicated her appreciation for antiquity with a deep distrust of the martial values promoted in the Greek and Roman classics. These similarities notwithstanding, Landon’s Hellenism differed from that of Aikin and Hemans in its sheer variety of form and expression and in its intense reflexivity. Her collected works include more than thirty poems involving some aspect of ancient Greek mythology, literature, and history.2 These poems cover a wide range of topics and attitudes, from the anxieties of motherhood during the Persian War (“Eucles Announcing the Victory at Marathon” [1826]) to a philhellenic rallying cry (“Greek Song” [1836]). Throughout this diverse and often experimental collection, which she penned under the initials “L.E.L.,” Landon explored the problematic work of cultural memory represented in the idea of “Greece.” Her Hellenism was hesitant and introspective, uneasy with the utopian vision of ancient Greece it often perpetuated—uneasy even when it championed the seemingly unassailable independence of modern Greeks.
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Notes
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© 2013 Noah Comet
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Comet, N. (2013). Letitia Landon and the Second Thoughts of Romantic Hellenism. In: Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316226_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316226_5
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