Travel and Home in Homers Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns (Classical Presences) ISBN-13: 9780198814016

ISBN-13: 9780198814016

Binding: Hardcover

Author: Dougherty, Carol

Details: Travel and Home in Homers Odyssey and Contemporary Literature brings Homers Odyssey together with contemporary literary texts ranging from Rebecca Wests The Return of the Soldier to Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping and Cormac McCarthys The Road to produce new readings that reframe, reorient, and ultimately revise aspects of Homers 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 Homers 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.

Release Date: 20-08-2019

Package Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches

Languages: English

Part Number: 9780198814016

Number Of Pages: 176