Presents a collection of eight critical essays on the works of Homer.

Presents a series of critical essays discussing the structure, themes, and subject matter of Homer's The Iliad.

The second of the two great epic poems attributed to Homer, The Odyssey takes place after the Trojan War and tells the story of Odysseus's voyage home to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope. Odysseus's journey is a perilous one, filled with precarious adventures and strange mythical creatures. Supported by numerous full-length essays, this updated volume offers various critical approaches to exploring this powerful tale of magic and heroism.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In classics, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of classics. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

What if formularity, meter, and Kunstsprache in Homer weren't abstract, mechanical systems that constrained the poet's freedom, but rather adaptive technologies that helped poets to sustain feats of great creativity? This book explores this hypothesis by reassessing the key formal features of Homer's poetic technique through the lenses of contemporary linguistics and the cognitive sciences, as well as by drawing some unexpected parallels from the contemporary world (from the dialects of English used in popular music, to the prosodic strategies employed in live sports commentary, to the neuroscience of jazz improvisation). Aimed at Classics students and specialists alike, this book provides thorough and accessible introductions to the main debates in Homeric poetics, along with new and thought-provoking ways of understanding Homeric creativity.

The modern landscape of American entertainment is filled with commentary on the state of the union. Viewers turn to The Daily Show instead of Fox or CNN, satirical films such as Wag the Dog, cartoons like The Simpsons, or controversial action dramas similar to 24 in order to learn more about current events in the United States. Popular culture is educating America more than the nightly news, aiding viewers in their quest to understand the American political system. In Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture, Joseph J. Foy and other contributing scholars offer diverse political perspectives through the framework of popular culture. From the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the cutting-edge television program Chappelle's Show, a wide spectrum of entertainment media is used to explain the complexities of U.S. politics and how audiences engage with them. Popular culture and politics have never been so intertwined in the American consciousness as they are today. As political knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, Homer Simpson Goes to Washington explains how popular culture can actually help connect people to their government.

Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period when the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest—from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance—and the period when it began to become a secondary focus—the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, de Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.

This book takes a bold new approach to the prehistory of Homeric epic, arguing for a fresh understanding of how Near Eastern influence worked.

The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative is the first English translation of one of the most important and influential modern studies in this tradition. In this revised and expanded edition, Alessandro Barchiesi advances innovative approaches even as he recuperates significant earlier interpretations, from Servius to G. N. Knauer. Approaching Homeric allusions in the Aeneid as "narrative effects" rather than glimpses of the creative mind of the author at work, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative demonstrates how these allusions generate hesitations and questions, as well as insights and guidance, and how they participate in the creation of narrative meaning. The book also examines how layers of competing interpretations in Homer are relevant to the Aeneid, revealing again the richness of the Homeric tradition as a component of meaning in the Aeneid. Finally, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative goes beyond previous studies of the Aeneid by distinguishing between two forms of Homeric intertextuality: reusing a text as an individual model or as a generic matrix. For this edition, a new chapter has been added, and in a new afterword the author puts the book in the context of changes in the study of Latin literature and intertextuality. A masterful work of classical scholarship, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative also has valuable insights for the wider study of imitation, allusion, intertextuality, epic, and literary theory.

This volume takes as its focus an oft-neglected work of ancient philosophy: Aristotle's lost Homeric Problems. The evidence for this lost work consists mostly of 'fragments' surviving in the Homeric scholia - comments in the margins of the medieval manuscripts of the Homeric epics, mostly coming from lost commentaries on these epics - though the series of studies presented here puts forward a persuasive case that other sources have been overlooked. These studies focus on various aspects of the Homeric Problems and are grouped into three parts. The first deals with preliminary issues: the relationship of this lost work to the Homeric scholarship that came before it, and to Aristotle's comments on Homeric scholarship in his extant Poetics; the evidence concerning the possible titles of this work; and a neglected early edition of the fragments. Following on from this, the second part attempts to expand our knowledge of the Homeric Problems through an examination in context of quotations from (or allusions to) Homer in Aristotle's extant works, and specifically in the History of Animals, the Rhetoric, and Poetics 21, while Part Three consists of four studies on select (and in most cases disregarded) fragments. Collectively the chapters support the conclusion that Aristotle in the Homeric Problems aimed to defend Homer against his critics, but not slavishly and without employing allegorical interpretation; within the context of a renewed interest in Aristotle's lost works, the volume as a whole brings much needed illumination to a virtually unknown ancient work involving not one but two giants of the classical world.