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Reading Homer's Odyssey is a book by book commentary on the epic's major themes. Each of the epic's 24 books are divided into sections to stress the length and the importance placed on specific topics and episodes. Footnotes are provided throughout to clarify and complete myths that Homer leaves unfinished, to explain certain terms and phrases, and to provide background information whenever necessary. Additionally, there is a bibliography on the Odyssey, as well as bibliographies that accompany each book's commentary.
We still read Homer’s epic the Iliad two-and-one-half millennia since its emergence for the questions it poses and the answers it provides for our age, as viable today as they were in Homer’s own times. What is worth dying for? What is the meaning of honor and fame? What are the consequences of intense emotion and violence? What does recognition of one’s mortality teach? We also turn to Homer’s Iliad in the twenty-first century for the poet’s preoccupation with the essence of human life. His emphasis on human understanding of mortality, his celebration of the human mind, and his focus on human striving after consciousness and identity has led audiences to this epic generation after generation. This study is a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s 24 parts, meant to inform students new to the work. Endnotes clarify and elaborate on myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Iliad, in addition to bibliographies accompanying each book’s commentary.
"A tragic play about the Ancient Greek warrior-king Odysseus, and a prequel to Nikos Kazantzakis's epic poem The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, inspired by Homer's The Odyssey"--
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These nine new essays on Homer's epics deal not only with major Homeric themes of time (honor), kleos (fame), geras (rewards), the psychology of Homeric warriors, and the re-evaluation of type scenes, but also with Homer's influence on contemporary film. Following the introduction and an essay which sets the historical background for the epics, four essays are devoted to fresh analysis of key passages and themes while another four turn to a discussion of the film Troy and Homer's influence on two other genres of American cinema.
This work comprises a literary comparison of surviving alternative versions of selected narrative-cycles from the "Nights." Pinault draws on the published Arabic editions - especially Bulaq, MacNaghten, and the fourteenth-century Galland text recently edited by Mahdi - as well as unpublished Arabic manuscripts from libraries in France and North Africa. The study demonstrates that significantly different versions have survived of some of the most famous tales from the "Nights." Pinault notes how individual manuscript redactors employed - and sometimes modified - formulaic phrases and traditional narrative topoi in ways consonant with the themes emphasized in particular versions of a tale. He also examines the redactors' modification of earlier sources - Arabic chronicles and Islamic religious treatises, geographers' accounts and medieval legends - for specific narrative goals. Comparison of the narrative structure of diverse story-collection also sheds new light on the relationship of the embedded subordinate-narrative to the overarching frame-tale. All cited passages from the "Nights" and other Arabic story- collections have been fully translated into English.
Approaches to Homer's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' consists of ten original essays on the Iliad and Odyssey by established Homeric scholars and university professors of Greek literature and culture. The anthology offers not only fresh approaches to reading, appreciating, and understanding these Homeric epics, but also attempts to make a case why these works are still relevant in the twenty-first century. Both epics are required reading in most college/university general and world literature courses, as is evident from their inclusion in part or in whole in many standard world literature anthologies. These ten new approaches to the first literary works of Western culture are intended as reading aids for both instructors and students in any college/university classroom in which either of these two Homeric epics are taught.
This collection takes on the problem of representing race in the context of a master language and culture. These essays discuss this problem in terms of the ongoing struggle to redefine the self as speaker, that is, to re-construe our understanding of history, sexuality, and speech itself in a continuing battle for self-definition. As a totality, these essays explode the notion of race as a natural boundary between groups and pose a variety of possible constructions that force us to accept race not as a category, but as a practice. Kostas and Linda Myrsiades have brought together scholars whose varied essays explore the issues of voice, history, and sexuality in such diverse venues as detective fiction, the Clarence Thomas hearings, the witches of Salem, the Harlem Renaissance, and the work of Toni Morrison, demonstrating that resistance to race-ing is both meaningfully engaged as a cultural possibility and rewritten as a linguistic practice.
Focusing on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Albert D. Pionke's book historicizes the relationship of ritual, class, and public status in Victorian England. His analysis of various discourses related to professionalization suggests that public ritual flourished during the period, especially among the burgeoning ranks of Victorian professions. As Pionke shows, magazines, court cases, law books, manuals, and works by authors that include William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hughes, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning demonstrate the importance of ritual in numerous professional settings. Individual chapters reconstruct the ritual cultures...
To understand contemporary times, we must appreciate the extent to which our lives are affected by the cultural and political struggle between "official" narratives and the counternarratives which emerge as oppositional responses. Counternarratives develops a concept of "postmodern counternarratives" as a frame for exploring the politics of media, technology and education within everyday struggles for human identities and loyalties. The authors identify two forms of counternarratives. One functions as a critique of the modernist propensity for grand narratives. The second concept, which is the focus of the book, builds on the first; the idea of "little stories" addressing cultural and political opposition to the "official" narratives used to manipulate public consciousness. Each marks an important point of contestation within contemporary education and culture: curriculum, pedagogy, literacy, media representations and applications of new technologies.