William Brockliss, responding to George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's analysis of metaphor, explores the Homeric poets' use of concrete concepts drawn from the Greek natural environment to aid their audiences' understanding of abstract concepts. In particular, he considers Homeric images associating flowers with deception, disorder, and death.

From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.

An examination of the aesthetic qualities of the Homeric simile

The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer's Iliad investigates each of the Iliad's twenty-four books, proceeding in order from book 1 to book 24 and devoting one chapter to each one. Contributors summarize the plot of a book and then explore its themes and poetics, providing both close readings of individual passages and synthetic reviews of current scholarship. This format allows readers to study the poem in the same manner in which they read it: book by book. Differing from other introductions to the Iliad that comprise chapters on specific topics and themes, the volume offers accessible and actionable discussions of concepts pertinent to each book of the poem. Differing from other introductory volumes that are written by a single author, this volume allows for a polyphony of critical voices and showcases the diversity of approaches to the Iliad. Finally, differing from commentaries keyed to the Greek text, this volume is completely accessible to those who do not read Homeric Greek. These features make the volume an essential resource for those studying the Iliad in translation and in the original Greek, for those in classical studies and in other disciplines, and for teachers and students, both those at the undergraduate level and those at the graduate level.

Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer puts Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros in conversation with Homer, especially the Odyssey, to show how reading them against each other changes our understanding of the poems of both poets. It explores Walcott's conscious use of the Odyssey and the Homeric persona of Omeros to explore his own deepening relationship with his craft and his identity as a Caribbean poet. Walcott's ability to serve as the vessel of history for his people and their landscapes rests on his transformation into (and self-perception as) Homer's contemporary and equal. Central to the project of Omeros is thus an account of his shift from a diachronic to synchronic relationship with Homer: over the course of the poem his poetic persona, the "Poet", and Homer come to occupy the same temporality and creative space. By locating the poems of Walcott and Homer in a zone of vibrant and unexpected encounter, Rachel Friedman demonstrates how they can be seen as mutually informing texts, each made richer in the presence of the other. The argument follows two intertwined thematic threads. The first focuses on the poems' landscapes and seascapes and the ways in which Omeros reworks the Odyssey's affective geography. While the Odyssey represents the sea as a dangerous space and valorizes life on land, Walcott reverses this trajectory from sea to land, bearing witness to the painful histories carried in the St Lucian soil and relocating homecoming to the space of the Caribbean Sea, a space which accommodates diasporic histories and the imagining of fluid forms of emplacement. The second thread focuses on Walcott's poetic persona: his journey in and out of the poem and his positioning of himself as a "tribal poet" like Homer. Central to the project of Omeros is the Poet's account of the processes by which he becomes the poet who can adequately give voice to the histories of his people and the archipelago they inhabit.

Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation explores how the enigmatic Phaeacian queen, Arete, is at the heart of an epic-scale "poetics of interrogation" used throughout the Odyssey to negotiate Odysseus' kleos, or epic renown. Arete's interrogation of Odysseus has been especially problematic in scholarship, but diachronic and synchronic analysis of similar interrogations across Indo-European, Orphic, and Greek epigrammatic corpora show that the "stranger's interrogation" is a formula that demands performance and negotiation of status. Within the Odyssey, this interrogation is part of an intraformular network used to generate kleos, and the queen's question initiates the longest and most complex negotiation of Odysseus' status in epic and memory. Arete's role as interrogator not only explains her strange authority and resonance with both Penelope and comparative afterlife figures, but it also establishes a gendered, agonistic tension between she and her husband, Alkinoos, that influences the structure, genre, and narratology of performances across the Phaeacian episode. This book reinterprets the Odyssey's central episode and challenges several assumptions about Nausikaa and Alkinoos' famed hospitality, even demonstrating how the Apologue is organized as a response to competing inquiries into Odysseus' fundamental status in tradition. The Odyssey ultimately navigates away from Odysseus' public reputation and roots his status in private memories, and Arete's carefully arranged interventions signal the larger process by which the Odyssey immortalizes Odysseus in poetry as a nostos hero. The queen and her question invite new applications of oral poetics that shed light on the structure, composition, and reperformance of the Odyssey.

Brings two of ancient Greece's most famous poets into conversation with contemporary theorists of gender, sexuality, and affect studies.