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.

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

• Introduction


• I. Placing Homer in the Twentieth Century


• 1: Johannes Haubold: Homer after Parry: Tradition, Reception, and the Timeless Text


• 2: Lorna Hardwick: Singing across the Faultlines: Cultural Shifts in Twentieth-Century Receptions of Homer


• II. Scholarship and Fiction


• 3: Richard Martin: Homer among the Irish: Synge, Yeats, George Thompson, and Parry


• 4: Stephen Minta: Homer and Joyce: The Case of Nausicaa


• 5: Barbara Graziosi: Homer in Albania: Oral Epic and the Geography of Literature


• III. Distance and Form


• 6: Emily Greenwood: Logue's Tele-vision: Reading Homer from a Distance


• 7: Oliver Taplin: Some Assimilations of the Homeric Simile in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry


• 8: Gregson Davis: `Homecomings without Home': Representations of (post)colonial nostos (homecoming) in the lyric of Aime Cesaire and Derek Walcott


• 9: Francoise Letoublon: Theo Angelopoulos in the Underworld


• IV. Politics and Interpretation


• 10: David Ricks: Homer in the Greek Civil War (1946-49)


• 11: Simon Goldhill: `Naked' and `O Brother, Where Art Thou?': The politics and poetics of epic cinema


• 12: Seth Schein: An American Homer for the Twentieth Century