AUTHOR-APPROVED
Reading Guides to Long Poems
Series Editors: Isobel Armstrong & Sally Bushell
The series enables readers to re-engage with the long poem as a vital form. Volumes provide generous extracts, or in some cases complete poems, from significant works combined with a reading guide and teaching tips from enthusiastic lecturers who have taught the poem.
Homer's Odyssey: A Reading Guide
Henry Power
A fresh and exciting approach to this great work of classical literature
Henry Power provides an overview of the whole poem, key extracts from the text itself and detailed commentary on crucial moments in the poem. Readers are introduced to Greek mythology and social practices and are equipped to consider both the oral origins and the rich literary reception of this early epic and to be able to discuss core themes within it.
Key Features
* Clear explanation of the poem's background written by a classicist who now works in an English department
* Aimed at new readers coming to the poem for the first time as well as those teaching it
* Includes innovative teaching strategies for engaging students with the poem
Henry Power is Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. His main research interest is in the reception of classical texts and ideas by English authors.
Dr Henry Power is Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He completed his PhD in English at St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge on 'Tom Jones, Appetite, and the Epic Tradition' in 2005. He has published scholarly articles in Translation and Literature, the Review of English Studies and the Cambridge Quarterly.
Acknowledgements
Note on the text
Series Editors' Preface
1. Mapping and Making
The Odyssey as an Epic Poem
The Odyssey and the Iliad
The Metre
Setting
Summary
2. Introduction: Four ways of approaching the poem
3. Selections from the Odyssey
Book I: Telemachos and Athene
Book VI: Odysseus and Nausikaa
Book IX: Odysseus as Storyteller: Polyphemos
Book XIII: Return to Ithaka
Book XXIII: Odysseus and Penelope
4. Contexts for Reading
Oral Poetry and the Homeric Question
Some Views of Homer
The Odyssey in English Translation
Literary Responses
The Odyssey and Epic Poetry
The Odyssey and the Novel
5. Teaching the Text
6. Suggested Further Reading
References
Index