'"We each have to endure our own afterlife": Female Authorship, Narrative Fracture and The Appropriation of Classical Myth in Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad and Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia'

This paper examines the reading and rewriting practices undertaken by Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad (2005) and Ursula Le Guin in Lavinia (2008). It explores the differing fractured narrative structures utilised in their respective appropriations of The Odyssey and The Aeneid in order to reinvent Penelope and Lavinia as female authors.Through the use of fractured narratives in The Penelopiad and Lavinia, the classical epic is represented as a set of unstable and historically contingent myths. [1]