Binding: Hardcover
Description: Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature brings Homer's Odyssey together with contemporary literary texts ranging from Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Cormac Mc Carthy's The Road to produce new readings that reframe reorient and ultimately revise aspects of Homer's iconic story of travel and home. While some novels share with the Odyssey a celebration of the creative process of improvisation to rethink the relationship between home and travel others draw upon nostalgia - our complicated longing for home - to unsettle the inevitability of return. Rather than offering an explicit retelling of Homer's poem each of these novels prompts us to revisit the relationship between travel and home that Odysseus and Penelope embody to ask new questions of that well - read text. Does travel reinforce or destabilize our notion of home? Are mobility and domesticity irrevocably gendered or can we imagine a world in which Penelope travels and Odysseus stays home? Just as Odysseus continually reinvents his own identity with each new encounter both abroad and at home so too we as readers participate in an improvisatory interpretive experiment of our own. This volume sets out a new model for reading ancient and contemporary texts together - one that challenges the conventional chronological assumptions inherent in many works of classical reception. No longer a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it the same the Odyssey together with the novels with which it engages changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.
Title: Travel And Home In Homer's Odyssey And Contemporary Literature Critical Encounters And Nostalgic Returns
Author(s): Dougherty Carol (Professor Of Classical Studies And Margaret E. Deffenbaugh And Leroy T. Carlson Professor In Comparative Literature Professor Of Classical Studies And Margaret E. Deffenbaugh And Leroy T. Carlson Professor In Comparative Literature Wellesley College)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780198814016
Pages: 176 Pages
Publication Date: 8/20/2019
Series: Classical Presences
Category: Literary Studies: Fiction, Novelists & Prose Writers