Search Results

“... which is an exercise in canon-formation on the large scale, surveying as it does the Yahwist, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Blake and Wordsworth, and moving into our own century, where the light falls on Freud, Kafka and Beckett. What holds these diverse writers together is their ‘strength’, which refers less frequently now to their revisionary powers ...”

“... literature or (still more obviously) of Classics. No one before the Sixties wrote narratologies of Homer, or even of Jane Austen. Biblical scholars have been slow to jump on the bandwagon, but now they are running as fast as they can to catch it. And in the study of ancient literature ‘excavative’ procedures do not necessarily represent the imposition of ...”

“... to Murder Me’, the poet-persona revisits his seven-year-old self, I sit in the garden reading Homer, shy lad under a folding one-man tent and daddy                   wants to murder me. The daemonic insecurity of the writing has its origins in this malevolent father, ‘Mr Not Sit Him On Your Knee’, who metamorphoses into an ...”

“... of 1915. Meanwhile, intellectuals like Blyden and the Ghanaian Casely Hayford were able to draw on Homer and the myth of Prester John to build the term into a symbol of pan-Africanism, linking it with independent black churches in the United States and with the ‘back to Africa’ movement. By 1911, when Casely Hayford published his Ethiopia Unbound, the name ...”

“... Swift sent Gulliver on a visit to the afterworld of Glubbdubdrib, one of the sights was that of Homer and Aristotle among their innumerable mob of commentators, both of them ‘perfect Strangers to the rest of the Company’. There are people one does not know, just as there are things beneath one’s notice. As Pope said in ‘An Essay on ...”

“... the reason in a letter of passionate sympathy to his cousin. ‘Everyone knows Marx’s opinion of Homer.’ The regime, in fact, as in so much else, was trying to have things both ways. We must have scholarship on obscure topics, but it must be researched and produced so that everyone can understand it in relation to existing ideological and party ...”

“... living counterpart in Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus, with their loyal slaves – an oikos that Homer sets in deliberate contrast to Clytemnestra’s love affair with Aegisthus and the murder of Agamemnon. The previous achievements of distant ancestors and close relatives are detailed in the special odes commissioned to celebrate victory in the great ...”

“... story is that Shakespeare is the greatest: ‘he had no rivals, ancient or modern.’ Admirers of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe or anyone else, see ye the error of your ways, and repent: abandon your idols, and worship the one true god. Fraser devotes three and a half pages (pages 170-74) to the whole of Jacobean drama, brusquely dismissing ...”

“... like the Greeks, and American Modernists such as Eliot or Pound are compelled to make reference to Homer or Goethe, to Shakespeare or the Italian Renaissance, skipping over the trite insignificance of the Yankee’s proximate world to embrace the past. Perhaps only in its very broadest dimensions is Fender’s analysis familiar from the scholarly literature on ...”

“... the sake of fairness … Aeneas was not as pious as Virgil depicts him, or Ulysses as prudent as Homer describes him.’ ‘That is true,’ the friend says, ‘but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian.’ Here we have history as hard knocks, which is exactly how one of Rushdie’s characters regards reality when defined by ...”

“... the length of a covered walk, but Lapidge feels sure that the kind of scholarly collation of Homer which was carried out there must have required studies, or carrels, or at any rate desks and chairs. Not only has the library not survived, no one knows what happened to it. All we can say for sure is that it was destroyed sometime in antiquity, but no one ...”

“... that is being used to translate. As with other strangely interesting translations (Logue’s Homer, Pound’s Cavalcanti, Browning’s Agamemnon), these can be understood only if we keep in mind the translatedness of the words that we are reading. What is the date of composition of Dante’s Inferno as translated by Ciaran Carson? Because translations of ...”

“... you need to know (or find out from Hopkinson) what the deities in question have been up to in Homer, Athenian comedy and the poetry of Hellenistic Alexandria. Homer’s Odyssey portrays the Cyclops Polyphemus as a terrifying cannibal; the Alexandrian poet Theocritus (third century BC) playfully recasts him as a lovesick ...”

“... that experience: on the Nile he reads the Odyssey; at Ephesus he notes, ‘I’m thinking of Homer’; at Thermopylae he whips out Plutarch on Leonidas, and so on. But consider also what happens when all this eventually passes into one of his own fictions, L’Education sentimentale: Il voyagea. Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots, les froids ...”

“... mathematics, philosophy and history. She became fluent in French and Italian, was translating Homer and Plato in her teens, and at 19 was learning German. Her knowledge of geology was said by the president of the Geological Society to be bold and broad. Her Unitarian background cultivated an ethos of good works inspired by a belief in the individual’s ...”