English

In October 2000, the Benaki Museum in Athens opened an exhibition entitled “Mother of God” which collected in one place many of the important icons of the Theotokos. In conjunction with this exhibition, the museum and the Institute for Byzantine Research sponsored in ...

Phillis Wheatley's neo-classical tour-de-force, "To Maecenas," exploits the affordances of ekphrasis to supplement and correct the image of her presented in the elaborate front-matter of her 1773 volume, POEMS ON VARIOUS TOPICS. "To Maecenas" pictures a theory (as WJT Mitchell might put it) about the liberating power of poetry and, at the same time, proffers a revolutionary claim to the ethos of a poet, the ethos of a free, representative self.  In this way, Wheatley anticipates the British Romantics attraction to and experiments with ekphrasis as a way to interrogate the limits and promises of representation, imagination and invention.

Wheatley redefines herself and her prospects by choosing to open her collection of poems with the rhetorical device of ekphrasis applied to her own situation. This act of agency asserts her equality as an educated person with men and with white people in the face of society’s claims that she—as a woman, a Negro, and a slave—is inherently inferior. She rejects the ways in which her master, the eighteenth-century evangelical clergy, a noble patron, and her publisher try to control her by defining her as their creation. Instead, her use of ekphrasis to compare her situation to those of classical literary figures such as Homer, Maecenas, Virgil, and especially Terence (a freed African slave turned playwright) invokes the classical tradition in order to assert that it inspires her radical claims of gender and racial equality. In doing so, she asked many of the same questions posed by radical elements in revolutionary America, including who has the right to define what we are or will be, ...