Product Description

Whether they focus on the bewitching song of the Sirens, his cunning escape from the cave of the terrifying one-eyed Cyclops, or the vengeful slaying of the suitors of his beautiful wife Penelope, the stirring adventures of Ulysses/Odysseus are amongst the most durable in human culture. The picaresque return of the wandering pirate-king is one of the most popular texts of all time, crossing East-West divides and inspiring poets and fimmakers wordwide. But why, over three thousand years, has the Odyssey's appeal proved so remarkably resilient and longlasting? Edith Hall explains the enduring fascination of Homer's epic in terms of its extraordinary susceptibility to adaptation. Not only has the story reflected a myriad of different agendas, but - from the tragedies of classical Athens to modern detective fiction, film, travelogue and opera - it has seemed perhaps uniquely fertile in generating new artistic forms. Cultural texts as diverse as Joyce's Ulysses, Suzanne Vega's Calypso, Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, the Coen Brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou?, Daniel Vigne's Le Retour de Martin Guerre and Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain all show that Odysseus is truly a versatile hero. His travels across the wine-dark Aegean are journeys not just into the mind of one of the most brilliantly creative of all the ancient Greek writers. They are as much a voyage beyond the limits of a narrative which can plausibly lay claim to being the quintessential global phenomenon.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #316162 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
''The Return of Ulysses' represents a major contribution to how we assess the continuing influence of Homer in modern culture.' --Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge

'Hall's rich appraisal will be greeted as the definitive investigation of a fascinating and many-sided phenomenon.' --Marilyn B Skinner, Professor of Classics, University of Arizona

'A brilliant, cultured and far-reaching tool for interpreting the Odyssey, 'The Return of Ulysses' will both teach and delight.' --Richard F Thomas, Professor of Greek and Latin, Harvard University

About the Author
Edith Hall is Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author and editor of several books - including the Oxford World's Classics' translation of Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra - and regularly contributes to TV, radio and professional theatre.

Customer Reviews

Reductive but entertaining
This essay offers incisive, enthusiastic, and sometimes mischievous glances at the subjects and ideology of works that patently derive from The Odyssey, or apparently develop aspects of its matter in non-Homeric contexts. To score certain points, Hall an eminent classics scholar batches her cameo critiques under convenient, if at times trendy, rubrics: "Telling Tales", "Singing Songs", and "Turning Phrases" but also "Colonial Conflict", "Women's Work", and "Class Consciousness". The Return of Ulysses is clearly not a treatise: its argument is too scattered, under-theorized, and idiosyncratic in its treatment of evidence to qualify as mainstream scholarship. Moreover, despite the subtitle and routine observance of chronology within chapters, Hall's discourse is not historical in any disciplinary sense, nor is its connection with "culture" (other than the post-modern) clear and continuous. Originating in a BBC talk as well as BA and MA courses Hall recently taught at the University of Durham, The Return of Ulysses addresses adventurous, literate non-specialists, interested in a Cook's tour and willing to countenance an implausible major claim: that The Odyssey is nothing less than the Foundational Text of Western Civilization.

Excellent overview
A compendium of all the various ways a famous text has been 'read' and re-interpreted - by other artists. makes you think differently about how all literature works via allusion to its predecessors and illuminates the Odyssey itself, which is distinctive, yet appears to justify just about every reading under the sun