A beautiful gift edition of Thomas Bulfinch's classic retelling of famous myths and folk legends, with interpretive essays by Princeton classics professor Richard P. Martin.
Biography (from Stanford University, Humanities and Sciences website):
Professor Richard P. Martin teaches Greek and Latin literature at Stanford. Martin's research focuses primarily on Homeric poetry and how it functioned as a performance art in ancient Greece. His research involves fieldwork in modern Crete where he interviews people there who still perform traditional oral epics. His analysis of audio recordings of people singing these poems led him to find a number of similarities with ancient Greek epic poetry. In addition,he has studied resemblances between ancient oral poetry and modern rap.
Prof. Martin is currently working on two books concerning Homer: the first, Rhapsodizing Homer, looks at how ancient competitive performance can aid in the understanding of the poems of Homer, Hesiod, and the hymns; the second, The Last Hero Song: Telemachus and the Generation of the Odyssey, is about the self-consciousness of the Odyssey in terms of the end of a tradition.
Martin is also currently working on the performance of Greek lyric as represented in myth and art, as well as editing a collection of essays on the analysis of Greek myth. He is just starting another book on Homeric theology and poetics. He has worked on presenting Homer digitally, in a full-scale multimedia version of the Odyssey on CD, in connection with distance learning experiments.
Born and raised in Boston, he studied Classics as well as Medieval and Modern Irish language and literature at Harvard University where he received his B.A. in Classics and Celtic Literature and M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Philology. Before coming to Stanford in 2000, Professor Martin taught Classics for eighteen years at Princeton University. He was the Chair of the Classics department at Stanford from 2002 through 2008.
Key Works
"Read on Arrival," in The Wandering Poets of Ancient Greece, edit. R. Hunter and I. Rutherford. Cambridge 2009.
"Words Alone are Certain Good(s)" TAPA (138.2) 313-49 (2008)
"Myth, Performance, Poetics: the Gaze from Classics," pp. 45-52 in Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology, edit. Neni Panourgia and George Marcus. New York: Fordham UP.
"Outer Limits, Choral Space," pp.35-62 in Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature, edit. Chris Kraus, Simon Goldhill, Helene P. Foley, Jas Elsner. Oxford, 2007.
"Homer among the Irish: Synge, Yeats, George Thompson, and Parry," pp 75-91 in Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, edit. Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood. Oxford.
The Birds (Aristophanes). Translated and adapted with Paul Muldoon. Gallery Press, 1999.
"The Scythian Accent: Anacharsis and the Cynics" in B. Branham & M.-O. Goulet-Caze eds. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. University of California Press, 1997: 136-55.
The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Cornell University Press, 1993.
"The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom" in C. Dougherty and L. Kurke eds. Cultural Poetics of Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics. Cambridge University Press, 1993: 108-128.
"Telemachus and the Last Hero Song" Colby Quarterly 29.3 (1993): 222-40.
"Hesiod's Metanastic Poetics" Ramus 21.1 (1992): 11-33.
Healing, Sacrifice, and Battle: Amechania and Related Concepts in Early Greek Poetry. Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft der Universitat Innsbruck, 1983.
