Speech Presentation in Homeric Epic.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. - The Iliad and the Odyssey are emotional powerhouses largely because i of their extensive use of direct speech. Yet this characteristic of the JL Homeric epics has led scholars to underplay the poems� use of nondirect speech, the importance of speech represented by characters, and the overall sophistication of Homeric narrative as measured by its approach to speech representation. In this pathfinding study, by contrast, Deborah Beck undertakes the first systematic examination of all the speeches presented in the Homeric poems to show that Homeric speech presentation is a unified system that includes both direct quotation and non-direct modes of speech presentation. Drawing on the fields of narratology and linguistics, Beck demonstrates that the Iliad and the Odyssey represent speech in a broader and more nu-anced manner than has been perceived before, enabling us to reevaluate our understanding of supposedly �modern" techniques of speech representation and to refine our idea of where Homeric poetry belongs in the history of Western literature. She also broadens ideas of narratology by connecting them more strongly with relevant areas of linguistics, as she uses both to examine the full range of speech representational strategies in the Homeric poems. Through this in-depth analysis of how speech is represented in the Homeric poems, Beck seeks to make both the process of their composition and the resulting poems themselves seem more accessible, despite pervasive uncertainties about how and when the poems were put together. - DEBORAH BECK is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of Homeric Conversation and several scholarly articles on Homeric speech presentation. ISBN 9780292738805