This chapter investigates the roles and the relevance of women in Greek epic, and argues that the tradition developed in Homeric epic has intense and complicated relevance to the later development of the tradition. Hauser shows that looking back to gender, and women, in Homer is as important now as ever. She surveys key moments in the Iliad and Odyssey featuring women; female characters like Helen and Penelope are examined first in their own right and then in their engagement with (and against) men, to illuminate the gender roles and the complex dynamics of womanhood and the feminine in the epics. Hauser ends by looking forward to the reception of Homer’s women in recent novelistic reworkings from Madeline Miller to Margaret Atwood, showing how Homer’s women are taking centre stage in contemporary classical receptions by women, a prominence which demonstrates their continuing relevance.

This chapter focuses on the novel of the twenty-first century to suggest that we are seeing now a new way of understanding the forms in which the novel pictures the world. The chapter opens with an exploration of the terms in which climate change and advances in the medical creation of artificial life have together shifted our understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. In light of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that the eco-crisis sees the collapse of culture into nature, the chapter suggests that the contemporary novel is involved in the picturing of a world that becomes thinkable when the opposition between nature and culture has been overcome. It then goes on to read this new kind of world picturing, as it comes to expression in twenty-first-century novels by three of the major writers of the contemporary novel – Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee and Don DeLillo. It is possible to see in these writers, the chapter argues, the culmination of the prosthetic imagination as I have traced it through the history of the novel, a culmination in which the capacity to picture the world is won from the novel’s intimacy with the resistance of our bodies and environments to the forms in which we seek to make them imaginable and habitable.