Homer, Odyssey

Homer, Odyssey

Greece Oral tradition: reconstructed as far back as the second millennium BCEWritten versions: reconstructed as far back as the 6th century BCE Homer, Odyssey §1. The ancient Greek epic known as the Homeric Odyssey is symmetrical with another epic, the Homeric Iliad,...

Epic Epics

Fall 2025 Class Sessions: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 11:55 AM–1:10 PM Instructor: Dr. Sohini Pillai (sohini.pillai@kzoo.edu) [….] Course Description: The term “epic,” from the Greek epos and the Latin epicus, is often used to describe very long narrative...

Love, Magic, and Women Warriors: Renaissance Italian Epic

Luca Zipoli, Department of Transnational Italian Studies, Bryn Mawr College [The upper-level undergraduate course “Love, Magic, and Women Warriors: Renaissance Italian Epic,” designed and taught by Luca Zipoli, led to a symposium exhibition, Epic...

From Homer’s Odysseus to Boiardo’s Orlando

  Inspired by Gregory Nagy’s playful experiment and thought-provoking introduction to the Odyssey, I’d like to join in the fun by responding to some of the points raised in his essay from the perspective of the Italian Renaissance romance epic. If, as noted, it is not...

Whatever Happened to the Epic?

by Jo Ann Cavallo. Anthem Press Blog. November 1, 2022   Miguel de Cervantes famously claimed to have composed Don Quixote de la Mancha to combat the imaginative hold that books of chivalry had over his contemporaries. Reading the novel for the first time as an...