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Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature

Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns

Carol Dougherty author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:24th Jun '19

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Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature cover

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 McCarthy'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.

Travel and Home is a very new sort of book. As much a study of the influence of Homer on contemporary literature as of the influence of contemporary literature on Homer, this book models a dynamic sort of reception using improvisation and nostalgia as its interpretive framework. * Hilary J. C. Lehmann, The Classical Journal Online *
As 'an experiment in improvisatory criticism', this book yields rich rewards for the reader who is already familiar with the Odyssey, as well as for those whose point of entry is one of the five modern novels ... Dougherty's approach is one which stimulates fresh thought about how we as readers (re-)interpret and 'receive' ancient texts based on the contexts in which we encounter them. * Emma Bridges and Henry Stead, Greece & Rome *
Dougherty does a beautiful job of laying out her argument. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * R. Stephens, CHOICE *
After having read Travel and Home you will not return to the Odyssey that you thought you knew. * Elizabeth Minchin, The Australian National University, Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
I can imagine this eminently readable and thoughtprovoking book would be a useful teaching resource for Comparative/World Literature as well as Classics. * Naoko Yamagata, Classics for All *

ISBN: 9780198814016

Dimensions: 220mm x 141mm x 17mm

Weight: 344g

176 pages