The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey » (New Edition)

Edith Hall is a research professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of a number of books on classics, myth, and the ancient world, including Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to 2005 AD, and Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars.

From the bewitching song of the Sirens, to the cave of the one-eyed Cyclops, to his final revenge against the treacherous suitors of his wife Penelope, the adventures of Ulysses/Odysseus are among the most durable stories in human history. 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 the "ringing plains of windy Troy" to the island of Ithaca. But why has the appeal of the Odyssey proved so remarkably resilient and long-lasting?

Edith Hall explains our enduring fascination with this epic tale 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, showing how works as diverse as Joyce's Ulysses, Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, Suzanne Vega's Calypso, the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Daniel Vigne's Le Retour de Martin Guerre, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey demonstrate that Odysseus is truly a versatile hero. The travels of Homer's charismatic wayfarer across the waters of the wine-dark Aegean are journeys not just into the mind of oneof the most inspiring of poets; they are equally a voyage around the boundaries of a narrative which, perhaps more than any other, can lay claim to being the quintessential global phenomenon.

The New York Times - Steve Coates

Is there anything in the Western literary canon with more abundant, potent or frolicsome offspring than Homer's Odyssey? Clearly not, to judge by The Return of Ulysses, Edith Hall's enlightening and entertaining cultural history…Hall, a research professor of classics and drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, fills her pages with sharp and often surprising observations about the Odyssey and its spiritual children. She devotes much attention to film ("The Searchers," "The Natural," "Cold Mountain" and many others), but even reflected in this modern medium, she realizes, the Odyssey owes a measure of its allure to its sheer, echoing antiquity. Reading her good-humored and accessible book is like conversing across the ages.

Pt. I Generic Mutations

1 Embarkation 3

2 Turning Phrases 17

3 Shape-Shifting 31

4 Telling Tales 45

5 Singing Songs 59

Pt. II World and Society

6 Facing Frontiers 75

7 Colonial Conflict 89

8 Rites of Man 101

9 Women's Work 115

10 Class Consciousness 131

Pt. III Mind and Psyche

11 Brain Power 147

12 Exile from Ithaca 161

13 Blood Bath 175

14 Sex and Sexuality 189

15 Dialogue with Death 203

Notes 217

Bibliography 243

Index 281