Offers an introduction to Homer's poem which sees it as rooted in a particular culture with its own narrative and thematic conventions, but it opposes the trends of scholarship which place it in a straitjacket of oral poetry and heroic design.
No Western text boasts a life as long as the "Iliad", and few can match its energy and glory. This introduction to Homer's poem sees it as rooted in a particular culture with narrative and thematic conventions that are only partly explained by assumptions about the properties of oral poetry. Professor Mueller follows Plato and Aristotle in seeing the plot of the "Iliad" as a distinctly Homeric 'invention' which shaped Attic tragedy and the concept of dramatic action in Western literature. In this second edition the text has been revised in many places, and a new chapter on Homeric repetitions has been added.
Offers an introduction to Homer's poem which sees it as rooted in a particular culture with its own narrative and thematic conventions that are only partly explained by assumptions about the properties of oral poetry.
Recenzijas
'Mueller deserves full praise for treating one of the most influential and jealously guarded texts in Western culture with an enlivening and communicative intelligence' - Critical Quaterly. 'It is the best single work on the poem that I know... Mueller has a genius for explaining important and subtle aspects of Homer with a clarity that should make the study available even to readers who know very little about Homer' - George De F. Lord, Yale University.
Papildus informācija
Offers an introduction to Homer's poem which sees it as rooted in a particular culture with its own narrative and thematic conventions that are only partly explained by assumptions about the properties of oral poetry.
Preface
1. Introduction
2. The Plot of the Iliad
3. Fighting in the Iliad
4. The Similes
5. The Gods
6. Homeric Repetitions
7. The Composition of the Iliad
8. The Life of the Iliad
Bibliography
Index
Martin Mueller is Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of "Children of Oedipus and Other Essays on the Imitation of greek Tragedy, 1500-1800". Together with Ahuvia Kahane, he edited The Chicago Homer, a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek (http://www.library.northwestern.edu/homer).
