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Spark young children's interest in the timeless Greek mythology with this picture book packed with legends, adventure, and humor! After his legendary adventures, Odysseus manages to return all alone back to his homeland, the island of Ithaca. With the help of the goddess Athena he will eventually fend off his wife Penelope's suitors, and reunite with her and his beloved son Telemachus. Homer's myth will spark children's interest in the timeless Greek mythology.
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As portrayed in Homer's Odyssey, Penelope - wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy - has become a symbol of wifely duty and devotion, enduring twenty years of waiting when her husband goes to fight in the Trojan War. As she fends off the attentions of a hundred greedy suitors, travelling minstrels regale her with news of Odysseus' epic adventures around the Mediterranean - slaying monsters and grappling with amorous goddesses. When Odysseus finally comes home, he kills her suitors and then, in an act that served as little more than a footnote in Homer's original story, inexplicably hangs Penelope's twelve maids. Now, Penelope and her chorus of wronged maids tell their side of the story in a new stage version by Margaret Atwood, adapted from her own wry, witty and wise novel. The Penelopiad premiered with the Royal Shakespeare Company in association with Canada's National Arts Centre at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in July 2007.
The book is a Supplement to a book of the same title heading - a fictional colloquy about the comings-of-age of Penelope, her sister Ipthime and her first cousins born into their royal House of Oebalos. The biography of Penelope is addressed for the difficulties of its analysis of just where her birthplace was: Aetolia or Lakonia? The Supplement also places the prehistorical analysis upon the biography of her father Ikarios and what else can be known as verifiable about her sister Iphthime. The major episodes of the sisters' girlhood years, as told by Penelope in Colloquy, are also set against the culture of the Late Helladic Greeks as we can best know them in broad setting of Lakonia, the precursor region to Lacedaemonia . The content is both culturally anthropological and and ethnological about the forbears of the natives whom the Spartans would later dominate throughout the 1st millenium BC.
In Homer's account, Penelope's story is the salutary tale of the constant wife. It is she who rules Odysseus's kingdom of Ithaca during his twenty-year absence at the Trojan War; she who raises their wayward son and fends off over a hundred insistent suitors. When Odysseus finally returns – having vanquished monsters, slept with goddesses and endured many other well-documented hardships – he kills the suitors and also, curiously twelve of Penelope's maids. In a splendid contemporary twist, Margaret Atwood tells the story through Penelope and her twelve hanged maids, asking: 'What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?' It's a dazzling, playful retelling, as wise and compassionate as it is haunting; as wildly entertaining as it is disturbing.
In a splendid contemporary twist, Margaret Atwood tells Penelope's story. In Homer's account, Penelope is the constant wife. It is she who rules Odysseus's kingdom of Ithaca during his twenty-year absence at the Trojan War. She raises their wayward son and fends off over a hundred insistent suitors. When Odysseus finally returns-having vanquished monsters, slept with goddesses and endured many other well-documented hardships-he kills the suitors and also, curiously, twelve of Penelope's maids. Margaret Atwood tells the story through Penelope and her twelve hanged maids, asking: 'What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?' It's a dazzling, playful retelling, as wise and compassionate as it is haunting; as wildly entertaining as it is disturbing. The Myths series gathers a diverse group of the finest writers of our time to provide a contemporary take on our most enduring myths. 'The Penelopiad shows Atwood making off with an especially well-guarded cultural treasure-and making it new, as she always does.' Independent Weekly
Eve of the Festival is a study of Homeric myth-making in the first and longest dialogue between Penelope and Odysseus (Odyssey 19). The author makes a case for seeing virtuoso myth-making as an essential part of this conversation, a register of communication which provides the speakers with a coded way of exchanging their thoughts. At the core of the book is a detailed examination of several myths in the dialogue to understand what is being said and to what effect. The dialogue is interpreted as an exchange of performances which have for their occasion the eve of Apollo's festival and which amount to activating, and even enacting, the myth corresponding within the Odyssey to this ritual event. --Book Jacket.
A retelling of the Greek myth in which Persephone returns from the underworld each year to bring spring to the earth.
The award-winning author of The Four Seasons retells The Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus and Penelope's daughter. With her father Odysseus gone for twenty years, Xanthe barricades herself in her royal chambers to escape the rapacious suitors who would abduct her to gain the throne. Xanthe turns to her loom to weave the adventures of her life, from her upbringing among servants and slaves, to the years spent in hiding with her mother's cousin, Helen of Troy, to the passion of her sexual awakening in the arms of the man she loves. And when a stranger dressed as a beggar appears at the palace, Xanthe wonders who will be the one to decide her future-a suitor she loathes, a brother she cannot respect, or a father who doesn't know she exists...
Children's version of the popular Greek myth, filled with humour, drama and adventure.