Homer in the Twentieth Century
Between World Literature and the Western Canon
Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood
This book argues that, in the twentieth century, 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 postcolonial and 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.
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Reviews
‘This collection is superbly carefully edited, cross-referenced and put into dialogue with itself. Graziosi offers a very subtle and well-informed reading of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare's satirical novel File on H.’
‘Firmly academic ... contains much of interest.’
‘A rich and stimulating collection of essays that should open many avenues for future research.’
