In The Many-Minded Man, Joel Christensen explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the ...workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences—both ancient and modern—a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate. By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, The Many-Minded Man addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, Christensen reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.
How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, ...the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy). Seaford argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal.
This comprehensive study of the Odyssey sees in meat and meat consumption a centre of gravitation for the interpretation of the poem. It aims to place the cultural practices represented in the poem ...against the background of the (agricultural) lived reality of the poem's audiences in the archaic age, and to align the themes of the adventures in Odysseus' wanderings with the events that transpire at Ithaca in the hero's absence. The criminal meat consumption of the suitors of Penelope in the civilised space of Ithaca is shown to resonate with the adventures of Odysseus and his companions in the pre-cultural worlds they are forced to visit. The book draws on folklore studies, the anthropology of hunting cultures, the comparative study of oral traditions, and the agricultural history of archaic and classical Greece. It will also be of interest to narratologists and students of folklore and Homeric poetics.
From tent revivals to radio and records with a gospel music
innovator Homer Rodeheaver merged evangelical hymns and
African American spirituals with popular music to create a potent
gospel style. ...Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo examine his enormous
influence on gospel music against the backdrop of Christian music
history and Rodeheaver's impact as a cultural and business figure.
Rodeheaver rose to fame as the trombone-playing song leader for
evangelist Billy Sunday. As revivalism declined after World War I,
Rodeheaver leveraged his place in America's newborn celebrity
culture to start the first gospel record label and launch a
nationwide radio program. His groundbreaking combination of hymnal
publishing and recording technology helped define the early
Christian music industry. In his later years, he influenced figures
like Billy Graham and witnessed the music's split into southern
gospel and black gospel.
Clear-eyed and revealing, Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of
the Gospel Music Industry is an overdue consideration of a
pioneering figure in American music.
Homer and the Good Ruler in Antiquity and Beyond focuses on the important question of how and why later authors employ the Homeric epics to reflect on various types and aspects of leadership.
Virgil's Homeric Lens reevaluates the traditional view of the Aeneid's relationship to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Almost since the death of Virgil, there has been an assumption that the Aeneid breaks ...into two discrete halves: Virgil's Odyssey, and Virgil's Iliad. Although modified in various ways over the centuries, this neat dichotomy has generally diminished the complexity and resonance of the connection between the two canonical epic poets. This work offers an alternate approach in which Virgil uses the transformative power of the Odyssey as a precise filter through which to read the Iliadic experience.
By examining the ways in which Virgil bases his own epic project on the dynamic interaction between the two Homeric poems themselves, Edan Dekel proposes a system in which the Aeneid uses the Odyssey both as a conceptual model for writing an intertextual epic and as a powerful refracting lens for the specific interpretation of the Iliad and its consequences. The traditional view of the Homeric poems as static sources for the construction of distinct "Odyssean" and "Iliadic" halves of the Aeneid is supplanted by an analysis which emphasizes the active and persistent influence of the Odyssey as a guide to processing the major thematic concerns of the Iliad and exploring the multiple aftermaths of the Trojan war.
The 20th century saw many contrasting approaches to Homer. On the one hand, Homer was often seen as the father of the western literary canon, the first author in a genealogy that included canonical ...poets such as Apollonius, Virgil, Dante, and Milton. On the other, Homeric poetry was thought to have strong affinities with poems, performances, and traditions that were sometimes deemed neither literary nor western: the epic of Yugoslavia and sub-Saharan Africa, the keening performances of Irish women, the spontaneous inventiveness of the Blues. This collection of essays attempts to trace the tensions and connections between different visions of Homer in the 20th century. Part I investigates the place of Homer in the shifting cultural landscapes of the 20th century; Part II explores the connections between scholarly and creative approaches to the Homeric poems; Part III looks at some of the means through which writers, poets, scholars, and film-makers mapped their distance from Homer; and Part IV discusses the political and interpretative challenges posed by reading (and not reading) Homer in the 20th century. The book contributes to current debates about the nature of the western literary canon, the evolving concept of world literature, the relationship between orality and the written word, and the dialogue between texts across time and space. It argues that the Homeric poems played an important role in shaping those debates and, conversely, that the experiences of the 20th century opened new avenues for the interpretation of Homer's much-travelled texts.
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