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| "What virtue and wisdom can do" : Homer's "Odyssey" in the Renaissance imagination | |||
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| Author | Van der Laan, Sarah Phillips | ||
| ISBN/ISSN | 9780549977650 | ||
| Broad Subject |
Literature | ||
| Summary | If the Iliad is a poem about what it is to be mortal, the Odyssey is a poem about what it is to be human. The Odyssey charts the attempts of one man and his world to reassemble the fragments of their lives after a devastating war. It is no historical accident that this vision of the Odyssey became central to late Renaissance literature and criticism. The Odyssey presented opportunities to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the humanist ethos so enthusiastically propounded during the first heady decades of the Renaissance and so powerfully challenged by real-world crises. More than any other epic, the Odyssey provided a potential foundation for a poetic ethics---tools for living developed in poetry---for belated, post-war, post-humanist societies. This dissertation explores the use of the Odyssey in the Renaissance epic tradition; in doing so, it assembles readings of these individual works into a narrative that traces the rediscovery and repeated reinvention of the Odyssey through several countries and two centuries. Despite the centrality of the Odyssey and the figure of Odysseus to the Renaissance, the intertwined histories of their scholarly and creative reception in the period remain essentially unwritten. Yet this rich and complex reception left its traces alongside those of Homer's poem on the masterpieces of the Renaissance epic and romance traditions: Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Each captures a stage in the development of readings of the Odyssey and of its increasingly multivalent role in the Renaissance imagination. In each chapter, I situate readings of an author's use of the Odyssey against a background of contemporary readings of the Odyssey; I use translations, editions, paratexts, handwritten marginalia, and criticism to reconstruct the horizon of expectations for a reader of the Odyssey at the moment of that author's appearance in print. By doing so, I contribute to a more precise understanding of an important Renaissance cultural development and participate in current attempts to reassert a role for the author within a culture of reading practices and discourses. | ||
| Language | English | ||
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| Available at : | |||
| Click to view the dissertation via Digital dissertation consortium | |||
| Authorized remote access from |
Current HKU staff and students (HKUVPN access) Current HKU staff and students (EZproxy access) HKU SPACE | ||
| Format | E-theses | ||
| Location | Web Mounted | ||