Odysseus and Penelope


Book Description

Spark young children's interest in the timeless Greek mythology with this picture book packed with legends, adventure, and humor! After his legendary adventures, Odysseus manages to return all alone back to his homeland, the island of Ithaca. With the help of the goddess Athena he will eventually fend off his wife Penelope's suitors, and reunite with her and his beloved son Telemachus. Homer's myth will spark children's interest in the timeless Greek mythology.




The Penelopiad


Book Description

As portrayed in Homer's Odyssey, Penelope - wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy - has become a symbol of wifely duty and devotion, enduring twenty years of waiting when her husband goes to fight in the Trojan War. As she fends off the attentions of a hundred greedy suitors, travelling minstrels regale her with news of Odysseus' epic adventures around the Mediterranean - slaying monsters and grappling with amorous goddesses. When Odysseus finally comes home, he kills her suitors and then, in an act that served as little more than a footnote in Homer's original story, inexplicably hangs Penelope's twelve maids. Now, Penelope and her chorus of wronged maids tell their side of the story in a new stage version by Margaret Atwood, adapted from her own wry, witty and wise novel. The Penelopiad premiered with the Royal Shakespeare Company in association with Canada's National Arts Centre at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in July 2007.




Homeric Conversation


Book Description

Deborah Beck argues that conversation should be considered a traditional Homeric type scene, alongside other types such as arrival, sacrifice and battle. She draws on linguitic work and oral aesthetics to describe typical conversational patterns that characterise a range of situations.




The Penelope Project


Book Description

The Arts of Penelope: Art-Making and Making Artifacts, by Ellie Rose and Shannon Scrofano -- Who Is a Hero in Your Own Life?, by Jolene Hansen -- Mamie's Story, by Beth Meyer-Arnold -- On Playing the Suitors: In Dialogue, by Daniel Cohen and Rusty Tym -- On Playing Penelope: In Dialogue, by Joyce Heinrich and Nikki Zaleski -- Five Seconds after the Audience Left, by Anne Basting -- The Magic of the Movement, by Anne Basting and Leonard Cruz -- Finding an Ending, by Maureen Towey -- Excerpt from Finding Penelope, Scene 5, by Anne Basting -- Part Five: Evaluation and Evolution -- Beyond Penelope at Luther Manor, by Ellie Rose -- On the Challenges of Continuity in Civic Arts Projects: In Dialogue, by Michael Rohd and Anne Basting -- Making Structural Changes in the Curriculum through Penelope, by Robin Mello and Anne Basting -- What Did the Research Tell Us?, by Robin Mello and Julie Voigts -- The Essential Elements of Penelope, by Robin Mello and Julie Voigts -- The Landscape beyond Penelope, by Anne Basting, Ellie Rose, and Maureen Towey -- Appendices -- Appendix 1. Penelope Project Timeline -- Appendix 2. Penelope Project Team -- Appendix 3. Partnership Agreement -- Appendix 4. Prompts for Penelope Activities and Challenges -- Appendix 5. Storytelling and Playwriting Syllabus -- Appendix 6. A Note on the Program Evaluation, by Robin Mello -- Appendix 7. Funding Partners -- Appendix 8. Survey Questions -- Contributors -- Index




Eve of the Festival


Book Description

Eve of the Festival is a study of Homeric myth-making in the first and longest dialogue between Penelope and Odysseus (Odyssey 19). The author makes a case for seeing virtuoso myth-making as an essential part of this conversation, a register of communication which provides the speakers with a coded way of exchanging their thoughts. At the core of the book is a detailed examination of several myths in the dialogue to understand what is being said and to what effect. The dialogue is interpreted as an exchange of performances which have for their occasion the eve of Apollo's festival and which amount to activating, and even enacting, the myth corresponding within the Odyssey to this ritual event. --Book Jacket.




The Odyssey


Book Description

The Odyssey is one of the oldest works of Western literature, dating back to classical antiquity. Homer’s epic poem belongs in a collection called the Epic Cycle, which includes the Iliad. It was originally written in ancient Greek, utilizing a dactylic hexameter rhyme scheme. Although this rhyme scheme sounds beautiful in its native language, in modern English it can sound awkward and, as Eric McMillan humorously describes it, resembles “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.” William Cullen Bryant avoided this problem by composing his translation in blank verse, a rhyme scheme that sounds natural in English. This epic poem follows Ulysses, one of the Greek leaders that brought an end to the ten-year-long Trojan war. Longing for home, he travels across the Mediterranean Sea to return to his kingdom in Ithaca; unfortunately, our hero manages to anger Neptune, the god of the sea, making his trip home agonizingly slow and extremely dangerous. While Ulysses is trying to return home, his family in Ithaca is also in danger. Suitors have traveled to the home of Ulysses to marry his wife, Penelope, believing that her husband did not survive the war. These men are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.




The Lost Books of the Odyssey


Book Description

A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.




Odyssey


Book Description

Since their composition almost 3,000 years ago the Homeric epics have lost none of their power to grip audiences and fire the imagination: with their stories of life and death, love and loss, war and peace they continue to speak to us at the deepest level about who we are across the span of generations. That being said, the world of Homer is in many ways distant from that in which we live today, with fundamental differences not only in language, social order, and religion, but in basic assumptions about the world and human nature. This volume offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to ancient Greek culture through the lens of Book One of the Odyssey, covering all of these aspects and more in a comprehensive Introduction designed to orient students in their studies of Greek literature and history. The full Greek text is included alongside a facing English translation which aims to reproduce as far as feasible the word order and sound play of the Greek original and is supplemented by a Glossary of Technical Terms and a full vocabulary keyed to the specific ways that words are used in Odyssey I. At the heart of the volume is a full-length line-by-line commentary, the first in English since the 1980s and updated to bring the latest scholarship to bear on the text: focusing on philological and linguistic issues, its close engagement with the original Greek yields insights that will be of use to scholars and advanced students as well as to those coming to the text for the first time.




Taking Her Seriously


Book Description

An innovative new analysis of the Odyssey's most influential female character




The Return of Odysseus


Book Description

Odysseus returns at last to Ithaca where he rids his house of the evil suitors, is reunited with Penelope, and visits his aging, grieving father.