Carl A. Rubino & Cynthia w. Shelmerdine (Editors)
Approaches to Homer.
University of Texas Press, 1983. First edition. 0292703619 xvii/275 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.5", is bound in burnet orange cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book is in fine condition. Dust jacket displays light shelfwear.
"Several essays are primarily concerned with what the Homeric poems teach us about the past. Richard Hope Simpson, for example, reviews the controversy sparked by his and John F. Lazenby's 1970 argument that the Catalogue of Ships in the "Iliad" accurately reflects the geography of Mycenean Greece. Using archaeology as just one of his starting points, Gregory Nagy reflects upon the death and funeral of Sarpedon as described in the "Iliad." Our understanding of the word "ate" is enhanced by E. D. Francis, who closely examines its prehistory. Norman Austin's elegant and original discussion of tone in the "Odyssey"'s Cyclops tale is animated by both psychoanalytic theory and his work with two practitioners of optometric visual training. Writing of Odysseus, James M. Redfield dubs that hero "the economic man" and links certain tensions in the "Odyssey" to the actual economic concerns of Greece in the late eighth century B.C. Both Ann L. T. Bergren and Mabel L. Lang concern themselves with problems of narrative in Homeric epics."