As Penelope Bauer celebrates her acceptance into the Classics program at Boston University, she is unaware that fate has groomed her for a grand adventure, a wild ride of Homeric proportions. Like her ancient namesake, the wife of Odysseus, she will have to depend on the courage of a woman warrior to see her through the perils of her own Odyssey.

In the wake of recent advances in the treatment of longstanding problems pertaining to the interpretation of Homeric poetry, this volume brings together cutting-edge research from a cohort of acclaimed scholars on Homer and the Homeric Hymns. The variety of topics covered spans the entire field of Homeric philology: the methods and solutions provided for a new edition of the Odyssey, the puzzle of the relation between the festival of the Panathenaea and the Homeric text, the disclosure of the meaning of notorious cruces pertaining to arcane formulas, the two emblematic heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Achilles and Odysseus, Homeric poetics, the range and use of repetition in a traditional medium, the composition of the Homeric epics, the Apologoi and 'Cyclic' Narrative, as well as the Homeric Hymns to Hermes and Aphrodite.

A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

Here Stephen Tracy offers a vivid, fast-paced narrative that serves as a reading guide to Homer's monumental epic. He not only provides translations of key passages and traces the evolution of major themes in the Odyssey, but also helps new readers to understand the artistry of one of the best tales ever told. Aimed at advanced readers as well, this book stresses an appreciation of how Homer has ordered his narrative, covering such topics as character interaction, family relationships, elements of poetic language, and the symbolic treatment of death, rebirth, growth, and knowledge. Given the controversy over the way the Odyssey was composed and handed down, Tracy concentrates on presenting the poem as a highly unified work. His analysis of the narrative structure reveals the epic to be arranged as a series of parallel journeys. The journey, seen here as a symbol of growth and self-knowledge, is among the major themes discussed in detail, along with the importance of women as overseers of life's journeys and the need for the sons of heroes to grow up worthy of their fathers.

His articles on classical and modern Arabic literature have appeared in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Ukrainian.ContentsIntroduction: Reclaiming Arabian MythThe Textual PuzzleThe Thamudic Backdrop to the PuzzleThe First Answer to the Puzzle: The Raid on TabukThe Totem and the TabooPoeticizing the ThamudDemythologizing the ThamudThe ScreamThe Arabian Golden Bough and Kindred Branches: Frazer, Vergil, Homer, and GilgameshConclusion

The Raft of Odysseus looks at the fascinating intersection of traditional myth with an enthnographically-viewed Homeric world. Carol Dougherty argues that the resourcefulness of Odysseus as an adventurer on perilous seas served as an example to Homer's society which also had to adjust in inventive ways to turbulent conditions. The fantastic adventures of Odysseus act as a prism for the experiences of Homer's own listeners--traders, seafarers, storytellers, soldiers--and give us a glimpse into their own world of hopes and fears, 500 years after the Iliadic events were supposed to have happened.

“A handy introduction to some of the more useful methodological approaches to and the previous scholarship on the subject of Greek myths.” —Phoenix Since the first edition of Approaches to Greek Myth was published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agreement on the subject of “myth” in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. Is myth a narrative or a performance? Can myth be separated from its context? What did myths mean to ancient Greeks and what do they mean today? Here, Lowell Edmunds brings together practitioners of eight of the most important contemporary approaches to the subject. Whether exploring myth from a historical, comparative, or theoretical perspective, each contributor lucidly describes a particular approach, applies it to one or more myths, and reflects on what the approach yields that others do not. Edmunds’s new general and chapter-level introductions recontextualize these essays and also touch on recent developments in scholarship in the interpretation of Greek myth. Contributors are Jordi Pàmias, on the reception of Greek myth through history; H. S. Versnel, on the intersections of myth and ritual; Carolina López-Ruiz, on the near Eastern contexts; Joseph Falaky Nagy, on Indo-European structure in Greek myth; William Hansen, on myth and folklore; Claude Calame, on the application of semiotic theory of narrative; Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, on reading visual sources such as vase paintings; and Robert A. Segal, on psychoanalytic interpretations. “A valuable collection of eight essays . . . Edmunds’s book provides a convenient opportunity to grapple with the current methodologies used in the analysis of literature and myth.” —New England Classical Newsletter and Journal

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From Stephen Mitchell, the renowned translator whose Iliad was named one of The New Yorker’s Favorite Books of 2011, comes a vivid new translation of the Odyssey, complete with textual notes and an illuminating introductory essay. The hardcover publication of the Odyssey received glowing reviews: The New York Times praised “Mitchell’s fresh, elegant diction and the care he lavishes on meter, [which] brought me closer to the transfigurative experience Keats describes on reading Chapman’s Homer”; Booklist, in a starred review, said that “Mitchell retells the first, still greatest adventure story in Western literature with clarity, sweep, and force”; and John Banville, author of The Sea, called this translation “a masterpiece.” The Odyssey is the original hero’s journey, an epic voyage into the unknown, and has inspired other creative work for millennia. With its consummately modern hero, full of guile and wit, always prepared to reinvent himself in order to realize his heart’s desire—to return to his home and family after ten years of war—the Odyssey now speaks to us again across 2,600 years. In words of great poetic power, this translation brings Odysseus and his adventures to life as never before. Stephen Mitchell’s language keeps the diction close to spoken English, yet its rhythms recreate the oceanic surge of the ancient Greek. Full of imagination and light, beauty and humor, this Odyssey carries you along in a fast stream of action and imagery. Just as Mitchell “re-energised the Iliad for a new generation” (The Sunday Telegraph), his Odyssey is the noblest, clearest, and most captivating rendition of one of the defining masterpieces of Western literature.

This wide-ranging collection makes available to specialists and nonspecialists alike important critical work on the Odyssey produced during the last half century. The ten essays address five major concerns: the poem's programmatic representation of social and religious institutions and values; its transformation of folktales and traditional stories into epic adventures; its representation of gender roles and, in particular, of Penelope; its narrative strategies and form; and its relation to the Iliad, especially to that epic's distinctive conception of heroism. In the introduction, Seth L. Schein describes the poetic background to the work and suggests a variety of interpretive approaches, some of which are developed in the essays that follow. These essays include previously published work by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Pietro Pucci, and Charles P. Segal. There also are a new essay by Laura M. Slatkin, two revised and expanded ones by Nancy Felson-Rubin and Michael N. Nagler, and three appearing in English for the first time by Uvo Hlscher, Karl Reinhardt, and Vernant. The result is a collection that juxtaposes older, often hard-to-find articles with significant newer pieces in a way that allows for a fruitful dialogue among them.