The Odyssey : structure, narration, and meaning / Bruce Louden.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Louden, Bruce, 1954-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Homer. Odyssey.

Homer.

Epic poetry, Greek--History and criticism.

Epic poetry, Greek.

Odysseus, King of Ithaca (Mythological character)--In literature.

Odysseus.

Oral-formulaic analysis.

Narration (Rhetoric).

Rhetoric, Ancient.

Homer--Technique.

Technique.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xviii, 182 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Summary:

Most studies of the Odyssey's narrative structure have focused on limited patterns within individual books of the epic or within sequences within books. In this ground-breaking new work, Bruce Louden uncovers an extended narrative pattern that runs throughout the whole of the Odyssey. Looking at such elements as characters' names, challenges faced by Odysseus, and roles assigned to the poem's women, he identifies a large sequence of successive motifs repeated in full three times throughout the Odyssey, which provides the underlying skeletal structure for nearly all of the poem's plot.

Louden's structural analysis helps explain the existence in the poem of several characters or episodes sometimes dismissed as extraneous or as late additions to or corruptions of the work. Further, the extended narrative pattern suggests that the epic has been transmitted to us as a whole rather than, as some critics believe, reconstructed from several smaller poems. Its existence also strengthens the possibility that the Odyssey was the product of an oral tradition.

Though centrally concerned with the form through which the poem presents its rich and complex plot, his study is not exclusively, or even primarily, formalistic. Based upon this close reading of the epic's structure, Louden offers new interpretations of the poem, exploring the role of divine hostility in the narrative and locating the Odyssey within a mythic subgenre in which a deity's anger at the impiety of humanity results in the survival of a single just man out of an entire community. This bold rereading of the Homeric epic -- the first attempt in fifty years to map in detail the poem's overall structure -- considerably enriches ourunderstanding of the Odyssey's design and meaning.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [163]-170) and index.

ISBN:

080186058X

OCLC:

39796065