Homer in the Twentieth Century Between World Literature and the Western Canon

by Graziosi, Barbara; Greenwood, Emily

• ISBN13: 9780199298266
• ISBN10: 0199298262
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-07-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This collection of essays explores the crucial place of Homer in the shifting cultural landscape of the twentieth century. It argues that Homer was viewed both as the founding father of the Western literary canon and as sharing important features with poems, performances, and traditions which were often deemed neither literary nor Western: the epics of Yugoslavia and sub-Saharan Africa, the keening performances of Irish women, the spontaneous inventiveness of the Blues. The book contributes to current debates about the nature of the Western literary canon, the evolving notion of world literature, the relationship between orality and the written word, and the dialogue between texts across time and space. Homer in the Twentieth Century contends that the Homeric poems play an important role in shaping those debates and, conversely, that the experiences of the twentieth century open new avenues for the interpretation of Homer's much-travelled texts.

Author Biography

Barbara Graziosi is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Durham University. Emily Greenwood is Lecturer in Ancient Greek Literature at the University of St Andrews.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. x
List of Contributors	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Placing Homer in the Twentieth Century
Homer after Parry: Tradition, Reception, and the Timeless Text	p. 27
Singing across the Faultlines: Cultural Shifts in Twentieth-Century Receptions of Homer	p. 47
Scholarship and Fiction
Homer among the Irish: Yeats, Synge, Thomson, and Parry	p. 75
Homer and Joyce: The Case of Nausicaa	p. 92
Homer in Albania: Oral Epic and the Geography of Literature	p. 120
Distance and Form
Logue's Tele-Vision: Reading Homer from a Distance	p. 145
Some Assimilations of the Homeric Simile in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry	p. 177
'Homecomings without Home': Representations of (Post)colonial nostos (Homecoming) in the Lyric of Aime Cesaire and Derek Walcott	p. 191
Theo Angelopoulos in the Underworld	p. 210
Politics and Interpretation
Homer in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949)	p. 231
Naked and O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Politics and Poetics of Epic Cinema	p. 245
An American Homer for the Twentieth Century	p. 268
Bibliography	p. 286
Indexes	p. 313
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