Alice Mary Remmington

My research asks how women writers receive, respond to and reimagine the mythical legacy of Ancient Greece. Inspired by the current trend in fiction for mythical retellings from female perspectives, I look back to Victorian Britain to examine to what extent, and in what ways, pioneering women writers of the nineteenth-century turned to the Greek classics for inspiration and authority. Through sustained analytical discussion and comparison of certain Victorian women writers' classical reception practices and the forms, genres and styles of their literary works, I argue that women's representations of female identity and creativity in the evolving society and culture of Victorian Britain were significantly influenced and inspired by popular feminine archetypes, received and adapted from Greek mythological literature. Whilst grounded in Victorian literary study, my project is cross-disciplinary, spanning the Schools of English and Classics. As a member of both the British Association of Victorian Studies and the Classical Association, I am excited to contribute to both fields.

Since January 2025, I have been employed as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) alongside my PhD research activity. Across two semesters, I have tutored on 'Empires and Revolutions: Literature 1680-1830' and 'Culture and Conflict: An Introduction to Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature'. For each module, I tutored two classes of 8 students and held a weekly office hour. I also marked two sets of coursework essays and a blind selection of exam papers, honing my evaluative approach to two different styles of student script.

My teaching style emphasises close literary analysis and critical discussion. I ask students to come prepared with evidenced ideas and arguments on certain questions to provide a developed foundation for group debate. However, I equally encourage on-the-spot thinking by raising new, improvised questions based on student response and drawing attention to evocative textual passages for group analysis. As a tutor, my role is to push students to develop their own critical faculties, rather than to impress mine upon them. Therefore, my goal is to challenge initial ideas and suggestions to help students form detailed and nuanced arguments.

• Victorian women's classical reception.
• Classical influence in Victorian media and culture.
• The enduring legacies of mythical female characters and archetypes.
• The unpublished writings and scholarship of Victorian women.
• Women's mythology and a mythology of womanhood.