Edith Hall has written a book many have long been waiting for, a smart, sophisticated, and hugely entertaining cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey spanning nearly three millennia of its reception and influence within world culture. A marvel of collection, association, and analysis, the book yields new discoveries on every page. In no other treatment of the enduring figure of Odysseus does Dante rub shoulders with Dr. Who, Adorno and Bakhtin with John Ford and Clint Eastwood. Hall is superb at digging into the depths of the Odyssean character to find what makes the polytropic Greek so internationally indestructible. A great delight to read, the book is lucid, appealingly written, fast, funny, and full of enlightening details. It is at once a serious investigation of a cultural phenomenon, an extended education in the humanities, and an invitation to a lifetime of trailing its seafaring hero.
(Richard P. Martin, Stanford University 2008)
Only Edith Hall could have written this richly engaging and distinctive book. She covers a breathtaking range of material, from the highest of high culture to the camp, cartoonish, and frankly weird; from Europe to the U.S.A. to Africa and the Far East; and from literature to film and opera. Throughout this tour of the huge variety of responses that there have been to the Odyssey, a powerful argument emerges about the appeal and longevity of the text which reveals all the critical and political flair that we have come to expect of this author. It is all conveyed with the infectious excitement and clarity of a brilliant performer. The Return of Ulysses represents a major contribution to how we assess the continuing influence of Homer in modern culture.
(Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge 2008)
Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses undertakes the formidable task of surveying the cultural reception of the Odyssey from late antiquity to the present. By tracing echoes of the poem in literature, painting, and music, noting its impact upon discourses of race, class, gender, and colonization, and identifying reflections of the myth in modern systems of philosophical and psychological thought, the author shows that it is arguably the founding text of Western civilization. Today, the Odyssey has lost none of its cultural power or resonance. Having found a new home in popular culture and contemporary media, it speaks with especial urgency to non-Western émigrés in a culturally fragmented world. Hall’s rich appraisal will be greeted as the definitive investigation of a fascinating and many-sided phenomenon.
(Marilyn B. Skinner, University of Arizona 2008)
In The Return of Ulysses, Edith Hall has given us a brilliant, cultured, and far-reaching tool for interpreting the Odyssey, and for reading, watching, and listening to the words, images, and music that have come into being in the refracted light of the Homeric poem. Taking us from Virgil to Cavafy, Circe to Dorothy—the first female quester—and Polyphemus to Batman, Hall’s work ranges in masterful ways among the times, places, ideologies, and theoretical frameworks that constitute the reception world of the epic to which all later epics are generically most connected. The book is written in a lively, witty, and hip style, wearing with impressive ease its enormous learning and cultural breadth. Edith Hall points the way, sometimes with elaboration, often with suggestive brevity, to the many pathways leading from and back to this familiar but always changing poem. The Return of Ulysses does not disappoint and has much to offer that will both teach and delight.
(Richard F. Thomas, Harvard University 2008)
British scholar Edith Hall takes 15 aspects of the Odyssey and traces their permutations from ancient times to today. The result is engrossing and enlightening.
(
Author Magazine 2009)
Hall is the optimistic traveller par excellence and leads us on a stimulating journey, roving far and wide through both time and space in pursuit of her hero.
(
Times Higher Education Supplement 2009)
[Hall] fills her pages with sharp and often surprising observations about the 'Odyssey' and its spiritual children. She devotes much attention to film ('The Searchers,' 'The Natural,' 'Cold Mountain' and many others), but even reflected in this modern medium, she realizes, the 'Odyssey' owes a measure of its allure to its sheer, echoing antiquity. Reading her good-humored and accessible book is like conversing across the ages.
(
New York Times Book Review 2010)
Hall's study of the Odyssey is thorough, entertaining and well referenced. She offers many ways for the reader to relate Homer's epic to more modern works of literature, art and film, thus bridging the gap between old and new.
(
Suite101.com 2010)
The book sparkles with the excitement...
(
Times Literary Supplement )
The Return of Ulysses is a sweeping tour of almost all one could wish to demonstrate about the spell of Homer.
(Zbigniew Janowski
First Things )
A true cultural treat awaits readers with ears and eyes attuned to both the higher and lower reaches of culture and in want of expert crosscultural, socioliterary criticism. Nostalgia may not generally be what it used to be, but Professor Hall has made a herculean stab at convincing us that there can be exceptions.
(
Anglo-Hellenic Review )
Edith Hall takes us on a tour of global culture high and low, mostly from the last hundred years, to demonstrate how Homer's great poem continues to permeate our sensibility and imagination. She is an informative and enthusiastic guide.
(
London Review of Books )
Though conversant with Homeric scholarship and the imperatives of postmodern literary criticism, Hall never burdens her prose with theoretic jargon... A goldmine of fascinating information on the persistence of thematic archetypes first formulated in Homer's great epic. Highly recommended.
(
Choice )
An extraordinary wide-ranging, clearly written, instructive, and engaging survey of the cultural reception of the poem from antiquity to the early twenty-first century.
(Seth L. Schein
New England Classical Journal )
The scope of the book is breathtaking and Hall, Odysseus-like, deftly navigates across the rich landscape she unfolds before us, guiding us through its landmarks with a style that is clear, engaging, and at times outright funny.
(Silvia Montiglio
Classical World )
A monumental overlook at the Homerian classic from all angles and a work which should keep the brain busy through just about any outer circumstance.
(Marilis Hornridge
Lincoln Country News [Damariscotta, Maine] )
From the bewitching song of the Sirens, to the cave of the one-eyed Cyclops, to his final revenge against the treacherous suitors of his wife Penelope, the adventures of Ulysses/Odysseus are among the most durable stories in human history. The travels and travails of Homer’s resourceful hero have thrilled countless generations of listeners and readers, who for almost three millennia have breathlessly followed his voyage home from the "ringing plains of windy Troy" to the island of Ithaca. But why has the appeal of the Odyssey proved so remarkably resilient and long-lasting?
Edith Hall explains our enduring fascination with this epic tale in terms of its extraordinary openness to adaptation and reinterpretation. Not only has the narrative been read to reflect a wide range of intellectual and aesthetic agendas, but it has been perhaps uniquely fertile in generating new artistic forms. Creative responses to the Odyssey have included the tragedies of classical Athens and the burlesque of Aristophanes as well as more recent genres such as travelogue, science fiction, the novel, opera, film, children’s books, and detective stories. Hall traces fifteen key themes in the Odyssey to illuminate the innumerable ways it has affected the cultural imagination, showing how works as diverse as Joyce’s Ulysses, Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, Suzanne Vega’s Calypso, the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Daniel Vigne’s Le Retour de Martin Guerre, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey demonstrate that Odysseus is truly a versatile hero. The travels of Homer’s charismatic wayfarer across the waters of the wine-dark Aegean are journeys not just into the mind of one of the most inspiring of poets; they are equally a voyage around the boundaries of a narrative which, perhaps more than any other, can lay claim to being the quintessential global phenomenon.
(2009)
