The mythical female figures and the revision of female subjectivity in the poetry of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke attempts in her poetry to achieve a pioneering revival of female mythological figures, revising well-known myths. This paper examines how such a revision serves the structuring of a post-surrealist poetic discourse, experiential and body-centered, which liberates the female poetic subject from the dictates of patriarchal poetry, presents a feminine perspective, and redefines female identity and women's stereotypical gender role. Such an approach also includes a comparison of her innovative use of female mythological figures with the way the same figures have been treated by other Modern Greek and European poets. The paper explains how the subversive review of specific mythical symbols (Iphigeneia, Helen, the Sphinx, Magdalene, Penelope) allows the expression of a multidimensional female psychosynthesis facing the issues of love, life and death, war and peace, poetical art, and tradition, which constitute the main thematic axes of her poetry. Most of the selected mythical symbols function as the poet's alter ego in a meta-feminist era, driving her to attempt t he reconstruction of herself. The re-evaluation of mythical elements in her poems reveals internal processes that respond to the need to project a subjective biotheory, reflecting the poet's personal struggle to balance opposing forces while trying to define and interpret the world. Taking into account the elements that contemporary feminist theory identifies as constituents of "écriture feminine", the investigation focuses mainly on analyzing within several of her poems the experimental attitude towards mythical context and meaning. It also reconsiders the response of specific features of myth to an ambiguous and timeless poetic speech and presents how Anghelaki-Rooke rewrites mythology as a means of challenging dominant male discourses and redefines the mythical method in the context of post-surrealism.