Oxford Critical Guide to Homer's Iliad

Oxford Critical Guide to Homer's Iliad
Author: Jonathan L. Ready
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192642626

The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer's Iliad investigates each of the Iliad's twenty-four books, proceeding in order from book 1 to book 24 and devoting one chapter to each one. Contributors summarize the plot of a book and then explore its themes and poetics, providing both close readings of individual passages and synthetic reviews of current scholarship. This format allows readers to study the poem in the same manner in which they read it: book by book. Differing from other introductions to the Iliad that comprise chapters on specific topics and themes, the volume offers accessible and actionable discussions of concepts pertinent to each book of the poem. Differing from other introductory volumes that are written by a single author, this volume allows for a polyphony of critical voices and showcases the diversity of approaches to the Iliad. Finally, differing from commentaries keyed to the Greek text, this volume is completely accessible to those who do not read Homeric Greek. These features make the volume an essential resource for those studying the Iliad in translation and in the original Greek, for those in classical studies and in other disciplines, and for teachers and students, both those at the undergraduate level and those at the graduate level.

Embattled

Embattled
Author: Emily Katz Anhalt
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1503629406

An incisive exploration of the way Greek myths empower us to defeat tyranny. As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation. Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us—as they encouraged the ancient Greeks—to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves. In an era of political polarization, Embattled demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way.

Homer: Iliad Book I

Homer: Iliad Book I
Author: Seth L. Schein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108351913

Book I of the Iliad marks the beginning of the first surviving work of Greek literature. This edition with commentary enables readers at all levels to interpret the poetry with heightened pleasure and understanding. It provides help with the morphology, grammar, and syntax of Homeric Greek, situates the poem in its historical and poetic contexts, and elucidates its traditional language, meter, rhetoric, and style, as well as its distinctive transformation of traditional mythology and narrative motifs in accordance with its own interests, values, and poetic purposes. It also addresses the programmatic contrast in Book I between gods and humans; the characterization of both major and minor figures; and the thematic significance in Book I and the poem generally of the representation of social, cultural, religious, and ethical institutions and values. Fully accessible to undergraduates and graduate students, this edition also contains much of value for the scholar.

Rethinking Orality II

Rethinking Orality II
Author: Andrea Ercolani
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2022-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110751968

This is the second volume on the mechanisms of oral communication in ancient Greece, focused on epic poetry, a genre with deep roots in orality. Considering the critical debate about orality and its influence on the composition, diffusion and transmission of the archaic epic poems, the survey provides a reconsideration and a reassessment of the traces of orality in the archaic epic poetry, following their adaptation in the synchronic and diachronic changes of the communicative system. Combining the methods of cognitive science, and the historical and literary analysis of the texts, the research explores the complexity of the literary message of the Greek epic poetry, highlighting its position in a system of oral communication. The consideration of structural and formal aspects, i.e. the traces of orality in the narrative architecture, in the epic diction, in the meter and the formulaic system, as well as the vestiges of the mixture of orality and writing, allows to reconstruct a dynamic frame of communicative modalities which influenced and enriched the archaic epic poetry, providing it with expressive potentialities destined to a longlasting permanence in the history of the genre.

Postoral Homer

Postoral Homer
Author: Rainer Friedrich
Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2019
Genre: Oral tradition
ISBN: 9783515120487

"Milman Parry's comparative study of Homer and Southslavic oral song had demonstrated the existence of an oral tradition behind and within the Homeric Epic, thus establishing an indisputable link between Homer and oral poetry. Yet its exact nature has remained a moot point. For equally indisputable is the fact of the coexistence of oral and literate features within the Homeric Epic. Thus not behaving as either a straight oral song or as a straight literate text tout court, the Homeric Epic calls into question the prevailing Parryist axiom of the oral Homer. The link between Homer and oral poetry has thus become an open question again: it is, in fact, the New Homeric Question that turns on the roles of orality and literacy in the genesis of the Homeric Epic.To clarify it this book experiments with a third term: postorality. As a postoral poet, having initially been trained as an oral bard absorbing the Hellenic oral tradition, Homer would have acquired literacy in the course of his career as an oral singer. It enabled him to widen, deepen, and refine his epic art, thereby giving rise to an epic as complex and unique, in terms of structure, characterization, and intellectual substance, as the Iliad."--

Homer

Homer
Author: R. B. Rutherford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1996-05-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199222094

A concise yet detailed account of the state of criticism of the two great epics ascribed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad

Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad
Author: Jonathan L. Ready
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2023-07-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192870971

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad explains why people care about this foundational epic poem and its characters. It represents the first book-length application to the Iliad of research in communications, literary studies, media studies, and psychology on how readers of a story or viewers of a play, movie, or television show find themselves immersed in the tale and identify with the characters. Immersed recipients get wrapped up in a narrative and the world it depicts and lose track to some degree of their real-world surroundings. Identification occurs when recipients interpret the storyworld from a character's perspective, feel emotions congruent with those of the character, and root for the character to succeed. This volume situates modern research on these experiences in relation to ancient criticism on how audiences react to narratives. It then offers close readings of select episodes and detailed analyses of recurring features to show how the Iliad immerses both ancient and modern recipients and encourages them to identify with its characters. Accessible to students and researchers, to those inside and outside of classical studies, this interdisciplinary project aligns research on the Iliad with contemporary approaches to storyworlds in a range of media. It thereby opens new frontiers in the study of ancient Greek literature and helps investigators of audience engagement from antiquity to the present contextualize and historicize their own work.

Handbook of Diachronic Narratology

Handbook of Diachronic Narratology
Author: Peter Hühn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 1033
Release: 2023-07-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110616645

This handbook brings together 42 contributions by leading narratologists devoted to the study of narrative devices in European literatures from antiquity to the present. Each entry examines the use of a specific narrative device in one or two national literatures across the ages, whether in successive or distant periods of time. Through the analysis of representative texts in a range of European languages, the authors compellingly trace the continuities and evolution of storytelling devices, as well as their culture-specific manifestations. In response to Monika Fludernik’s 2003 call for a "diachronization of narratology," this new handbook complements existing synchronic approaches that tend to be ahistorical in their outlook, and departs from postclassical narratologies that often prioritize thematic and ideological concerns. A new direction in narrative theory, diachronic narratology explores previously overlooked questions, from the evolution of free indirect speech from the Middle Ages to the present, to how changes in narrative sequence encoded the shift from a sacred to a secular worldview in early modern Romance literatures. An invaluable new resource for literary theorists, historians, comparatists, discourse analysts, and linguists.

Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry

Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry
Author: Thomas J. Nelson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2023-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316514374

Presents a new view of literary history by demonstrating how the earliest known Greek poets signposted their allusions to tradition.