Ebook: Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns

Odyssey brings Homer's together with contemporary literary texts ranging from Rebecca West's to Marilynne Robinson's and Cormac McCarthy's to produce new readings that reframe,
reorient, and ultimately revise aspects of Homer's iconic story of travel and home. While some novels share with the a celebration of the creative process of improvisation to rethink the relationship between home and travel, others draw upon nostalgia - our complicated longing for home - to
unsettle the inevitability of return. Rather than offering an explicit retelling of Homer's poem, each of these novels prompts us to revisit the relationship between travel and home that Odysseus and Penelope embody to ask new questions of that well-read text. Does travel reinforce or destabilize
our notion of home? Are mobility and domesticity irrevocably gendered, or can we imagine a world in which Penelope travels and Odysseus stays home? Just as Odysseus continually reinvents his own identity with each new encounter, both abroad and at home, so too we, as readers, participate in an
improvisatory interpretive experiment of our own.

This volume sets out a new model for reading ancient and contemporary texts together - one that challenges the conventional chronological assumptions inherent in many works of classical reception. No longer a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it the same, the ,
together with the novels with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.