Customer Reviews

Homer (Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a precise and concise beautiful introduction to the poetry, the text, the philological issues, the history and the 'Homer-question' of the Illiad and the Odyssey. By 'concise' I mean up to the point that satisfies a non-specialist reader without burdening too much details. This book serves the purposes of a specialist reader and an outsider as well with good bibliography. However the philological problem may not have been introduced at the beginning, on the contrary the section on "Readers' Homer" may have been the choice for the first section. However that may be the author's choice as he is an experienced professor. The classroom experience must have been the reason for this. I myself has been on the look for just this type of introduction on Homer.

Powell is a leading Homer scholar and this is simply the best single book to read alongside the Iliad and Odyssey and attain a round sense of the Homeric poems, Homeric scholarship, and the socio-historical milieu that produced them. It is appropriate for undergraduates and I assign it in my courses on Homer.

I found this book via Google Books. This is the first time I've ever ordered a book by going that route, but in this case, it seemed very well worth owning. Just the preface and the first several pages of "Part I: Background" made the book useful to me for some research I'm doing on Vico, who claimed in the 18th century that writing came into existence at the same time as speech, as evidenced by Homer. This book pretty effectively disputes that notion.

I'm giving the book a five-star rating based on the amount of text I've read so far. I may update later, but it has already proved itself incredibly useful.

hey, if you read this book, you don't have to read the boring old ilid and odyssey, cause their summarized right here, hooray! this book is good.