The Iliad [Paperback]

No Western text boasts a life as long as the Iliad , and few can match its energy and glory. This introduction to Homer's poem sees it as rooted in a particular culture with narrative and thematic conventions that are only partly explained by assumptions about the properties of oral poetry. Professor Mueller follows Plato and Aristotle in seeing the plot of the Iliad as a distinctly Homeric 'invention' which shaped Attic tragedy and the concept of dramatic action in Western literature. In this second edition the text has been revised in many places, and a new chapter on Homeric repetitions has been added.

Offers an introduction to Homer's poem which sees it as rooted in a particular culture with its own narrative and thematic conventions that are only partly explained by assumptions about the properties of oral poetry.

Martin Mueller is Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of Children of Oedipus and Other Essays on the Imitation of greek Tragedy, 1500-1800 . Together with Ahuvia Kahane, he edited The Chicago Homer, a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek (http://www.library.northwestern.edu/homer).