Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Classics after Antiquity) - Hardcover

Flack, Leah Culligan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107108039 ISBN 13: 9781107108035

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015

Synopsis

This comparative study crosses multiple cultures, traditions, genres, and languages in order to explore the particular importance of Homer in the emergence, development, and promotion of modernist writing. It shows how and why the Homeric epics served both modernist formal experimentation, including Pound's poetics of the fragment and Joyce's sprawling epic novel, and sociopolitical critiques, including H.D.'s analyses of the cultural origins of twentieth-century wars and Mandelstam's poetic defiance of the totalitarian Stalinist regime. The book counters a long critical tradition that has recruited Homer to consolidate, champion and, more recently, chastise an elitist, masculine modernist canon. Departing from the tradition of reading these texts in isolation as mythic engagements with the Homeric epics, Leah Flack argues that ongoing dialogues with Homer helped these writers to mount their distinct visions of a cosmopolitan post-war culture that would include them as artists working on the margins of the Western literary tradition.

About this title

Book Description:

This book explores the surprising versatility of Homer's epics of wandering and homecoming for the radical formal experiments and changing sociopolitical agendas of modernist writers responding to war, tyranny, censorship, and empire. Of interest to students and researchers interested in classical receptions, modernism, twentieth-century literature, and comparative literature.

About the Author:

Leah Culligan Flack in an Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University, Wisconsin.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1107108039
• ISBN 13: 9781107108035
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248