The return of Ulysses : a cultural history of Homer's Odyssey
(Book - Regular Print)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-279) and index.

The travels and travails of Homer's resourceful hero have thrilled countless generations of listeners and readers, who for almost three millennia have breathlessly followed his voyage home from Troy to Ithaca. Edith Hall explains our enduring fascination with this epic in terms of its extraordinary openness to adaptation and reinterpretation. Not only has the narrative been read to reflect a wide range of intellectual and aesthetic agendas, but it has been perhaps uniquely fertile in generating new artistic forms. Creative responses to the Odyssey have included the tragedies of classical Athens and the burlesque of Aristophanes as well as more recent genres such as travelogue, science fiction, the novel, opera, film, children's books, and detective stories. Hall traces fifteen key themes in the Odyssey to illuminate the innumerable ways it has affected the cultural imagination.--From publisher description.