Explore the vast range of titles available.

The achievements of Parry and Lord-arguably the most significant dyad in American humanistic scholarship of the last century-are worth revisiting in the light of the publication of a cluster of recent books. Parry was the son of an unassuming druggist living in downtown Oakland, California, and was the first of his family to attend college, while Lord, the son of a candy manufacturer, grew up in relatively privileged circumstances at a small farm in New Hampshire and in the Boston suburb of Alston, across the river from Harvard University. [...]by ordering over three thousand aluminum discs to bring with him to Yugoslavia, Parry set the stage for an experiment of unprecedented scale as well as kind, for he planned to use nonperishable materials to capture not just songs in their entirety (along with their music, sometimes in multiple performances recorded on different dates) but also to make faithful records of conversations with singers concerning their background, lives, and repertories. Later that same year, word reached him of Parry's tragic death on December 3, 1935, as a result of a gunshot wound suffered in a hotel room in Los Angeles. [...]Lord must have been in a state of shock when he realized that, at the age of twenty-three, he was the only person who could carry on with the main thrust

Adam Parry's \"Two Voices\" struck me as the most intriguing essay in the collection, in particular for the meticulous close reading of Aen. 7.759-760 in the opening pages, which seemed all the more poignant given awareness of the tragic circumstances of Parry's own recent death.To hear accounts of the same event in the news bulletins of the Irish broadcaster RTE and Britain's BBC was to hear two very different, and not easily reconciled, voices-itself a day-by-day education in the contrasting perspectives generated by different historical narratives and traditions; the political nuances of a language and its terms seemingly shared (thus what constitutes peace, how is it achieved, and from whose perspective?); and divergent notions of how the world worked, usually inexplicit and perhaps unconsciously held.Students in my classes on the Aeneid will recall me juxtaposing his essay with Walter Benjamin's dictum from his \"Theses on the Philosophy of History\" that \"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,\" followed by the injunction \"Discuss!\" This they duly did, with results for all concerned that were never less than interesting.

There is another way in which the essay is old-fashioned (a term which I mean to carry no disparagement), and that is in the plangent eloquence of its prose, matching its Tennysonian idea of a poet majestic in his sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind.[...]I also associate with the Harvard School a particular method: a seizure of particular details of language which are held to reveal, maybe in coded form, the poet's real meaning, and to counteract or cancel those things that he says overtly or more extensively in a contrary sense.Later proponents of the Harvard School tend to be systematic and academic, interpreting Virgil as a scholar poet; Parry's and Clausen's prose is the conversation of literary gentlemen.[...]the disposition, a decade later, to regard all authority as bad and self-serving did at least harmonize with the disposition to hear Virgil as a subversive voice (what was the moment, I wonder, at which \"subversive\" became a term of literary praise?).In the United States he dropped out during the sixties and protested against the Vietnam War; this bead-draped figure still haunts the American campus, and may be seen in some British senior common rooms too, glowering over the New Statesman at his younger avatar, a brisk, tough Virgil for the eighties, who accepts the Augustan regime smartly enough, on the grounds that there is no alternative.

(In that respect it is like Stanley Fish's hugely influential reading of Paradise Lost, Surprised by Sin (1967), according to which the reader is continually caught out in her fallenness, only to have her views corrected by the poem.) It makes Virgil available again for readers of liberal sympathies, hostile to war, imperialism, and one-man rule, and thus makes Virgil again \"ours\" as he was for Seneca.Later, disciplined by the severities of a newer poststructuralist criticism, I would come to see some of the vulnerabilities of Parry's thesis, and I wrote about these in 1993 in Redeeming the Text (40-43) and \"Descent into Hell: Reading Ambiguity, or Virgil and the Critics.\"Tennyson's love letter \"To Virgil,\" written for his nineteenth centenary, responds to many facets of Virgil's achievement, not just those qualities romantic taste privileged as his sole merit, the feeling for the tears of things, what John Henry Newman (1870: 76) called \"his single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time,\" but also the grandeur, the sense of Rome and empire and destiny, of time and historical process.The Idylls of the King are widely seen as falling short of truly epic grasp, but the combination of noble heroic melancholy with an (un-Homeric) sense of temporal process catches the grave march of the Aeneid uniquely for the period and better perhaps than any translation of any period:

In this article, analyses of Thucydides' story of the Spartan siege of Plataea (2.71-78) and of his plague narrative (2.47-54) show that Thucydides' references to natural and man-made materials characterize actors and events and are deployed for the exploration of political, cultural, and scientific themes. At the same time, Thucydides' references respond to his fifth-century reader's knowledge and concerns: Thucydides' readers were not Epicureans. I argue that Thucydidean narrative is therefore less friendly to Epicurean re-use than is sometimes assumed. Lucretius, the poet of the material, perceived this, and his reworking of Thucydides' powerful plague narrative aims to turn it to Epicurean ends.

[...]in the world of Le Guin's pre-Hellenized Italian religion, a firebreathing monster slain by Hercules becomes euhemerized as a grubby local chieftain, and no spectacular underworld serpent winds its way between Queen Amata's breasts. [...]while Le Guin does offer us several self-reflexive meditations on reading, writing, poetry, and poetics, the details of Lavinia's waking life demonstrate the author's considerable interest in the Aeneid for its content, or the moral and political problems and questions it raises, among others. Poems like \"Ariadne Dreams\" (Going Out With PeacocL·), 'The Crown of Laurel\" (Buffalo Gals), and \"Danae 46\" (Hard Words) all derive from classical mythology, and \"Ariadne Dreams\" I find particularly noteworthy here, since its speaker appears to anticipate several of Lavinia's meta-fictional quandaries: \"The beat of sleep is all my mind. / I am my rhyme\" (1-2). [...]the poem contains what I understand to be a reference to a future woman looking back upon the speaker: \"What woman weeps / on the far seacoast of my sleep?\" (15-6). [...]Cadden traces the \"dialogism\" of Le Guin's earlier works in a study strongly informed by Bakhtinian analysis; whether we ultimately agree more with Bloom or with Cadden- or decide that they don't really disagree themselves- Le Guin's propensity for the dialogic persists in Lavinia. [...]we needn't necessarily invoke Bahktinian heteroglossia to open ourselves to the possibility of more than two voices in either Lavinia or the Aeneid: see, for example, Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid. 25 See especially the distinction Le Guin makes between Boob \"crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him\" and \"Baby Oo Oo\" in her sling (166).

Twentieth-century research demonstrated that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey began as part of an ancient Greek oral tradition, and were passed down by word of mouth through generations of oral poets before and for some time after the invention of the alphabet. As the twenty-first century dawns, the modern (re)discovery of these unwritten origins is exerting an enormous influence on how we understand and teach the poems, presenting new answers to the ages-old \"Homeric Question\"-Who was Homer?-and suggesting comparisons with living oral epic traditions on five continents. By paying attention to the trademark structures and idiomatic values of Homer's language, the bequest of oral tradition, we can \"read\" the poems more faithfully. The perspective from oral tradition solves such stubborn and longstanding challenges as the heavy repetition of phrases and scenes, as well as the non-chronological order and anti-climactic ending of the Odyssey. Oral tradition can also show how Penelope emerges as a full-fledged hero-in some ways even more central a figure than her husband Odysseus.