Homer

Standard Name: Homer

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Elizabeth Barrett Browning
For a young woman who had never attended university (as she of course could not at this time) to offer a translation from a classical language was both courageous and confident.
It was a long...
Anthologization Sarah Lady Pennington
An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to her Absent Daughters quickly became a staple of composite volumes directed toward young women's conduct. At Edinburgh a volume of this kind, Instructions for a Young Lady, in every sphere...
Characters Alicia Tyndal Palmer
An introductory poem summarises desirable female qualities: Formed by the Graces, loveliness itself, / Come, with those downcast eyes sedate and sweet, / Those modest looks that deeply touch the soul.
Palmer, Alicia Tyndal. The Daughters of Isenberg. Lackington, Allen, 1810, 4 vols.
prelims
Feminist Companion Archive.
Having discussed her...
Cultural formation Phillis Wheatley
PW was a black African, whose colour dictated all her life-experiences as a slave in the USA (a British colony during much of her life) from the moment when, at the age of seven or...
Education Maria Callcott
She was, she said, mainly self-educated from the books which were all around her. (She read Pope 's Homer at nine.) She studied Sanskrit, Persian, and Icelandic as an adult. She later believed firmly that...
Education Ruth Padel
She found school work (at Byron House school in Highgate and then at the highly academic North London Collegiate ) difficult. She always got an A for English essays, although she would write a short...
Education Virginia Woolf
Virginia read Aeschylus , Homer , Sophocles , and Plato , among others, with Clara Pater. In 1902, however, the Cambridge-educated Janet Case , who was a feminist as well as a classicist, took over...
Education May Sinclair
Here she extended her already very considerable reading in English literature and philosophy, and in the Greeks from Homer and Æschylus . She also studied modern languages and several branches of mathematics and science.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
24-5
Education Frances Power Cobbe
She was able to learn a little Greek and geometry from the local parson, though she read Homer in translation.
Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Power Cobbe. Houghton, Mifflin, 1894, 2 vols.
1: 62
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press, 2004.
51
Education Mary Agnes Hamilton
On holidays her father taught his children to shoot with arrows and to play on pipes which they had made themselves, to light fires, and boys and girls alike, how to row, to swim, to...
Education Ketaki Kushari Dyson
As a child in a middle-class Bengali family, KKD was exposed from an early age to several languages, particularly Bengali, English, Sanskrit, German, and French. She learned English at home from her mother , who...
Education Jane Johnson
She was without formal education.
Whyman, Susan E. The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800. Oxford University Press, 2009.
162
She told a cousin that her favourite reading had been the Bible ever since she was a girl.
Arizpe, Evelyn et al. Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts. Pied Piper Publishing, 2006.
31
Historian Susan E. Whyman argues that it was through epistolary...
Fictionalization Sappho
In the twentieth century Sappho continued full of potential for poets and prose-writers. Naomi Mitchison fictionalises her supposed school; Eavan Boland takes her as guide on an underworld journey (as Dante took Virgil); Jeanette Winterson
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Carson
AC 's starting-point is the poem about Geryon by the Greek lyric poet Stesichoros or Stesichorus, whose surviving writings are so gnomic and fragmentary that every statement about them remains hesitant and uncertain. Stesichoros is...
Intertextuality and Influence Hélène Cixous
HC plays at length with allusions to Homer 's Trojan War, first blending Helen with herself since they share a first name. Helen, whose elopement with Paris of Troy caused the Trojan War, is made...

Timeline

Later 8th century BC: This time probably saw the genesis of Homer's...

Writing climate item

Later 8th century BC

This time probably saw the genesis of Homer's Iliad, though few dates are more hotly argued over, and the very existence of Homer as a person who created (traditional, formulaic, oral) epic poems...

1598: George Chapman published the first seven...

Writing climate item

1598

George Chapman published the first seven books of his translation of Homer 's Iliad, the first English version done direct from Greek; he finished the Iliad in 1608 and the whole of Homer in 1616.
Burrow, Colin. “Chapmaniac”. London Review of Books, 27 June 2002, pp. 21-4.
21

By September 1791: William Cowper published, with Joseph Johnson,...

Writing climate item

By September 1791

William Cowper published, with Joseph Johnson , his blank-verse translations of Homer 's Iliad and Odyssey: a version designed to supersede Pope 's translation in heroic couplets.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
61 (1791): 845

1870: The German archaeologist Herman Schliemann...

Building item

1870

The German archaeologist Herman Schliemann began to dig at Hissarlik in Turkey, on the site of Mycenean Troy (which he believed to be the Troy of Homer 's Iliad).
Bozman, Ernest Franklin, editor. Everyman’s Encyclopaedia. 4th Edition, J. M. Dent, 1958, 12 vols.
under Schliemann; Mycenae
Encyclopædia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/.

1897: Samuel Butler published The Authoress of...

Writing climate item

1897

Samuel Butler published The Authoress of the Odyssey, a book calculated to offend the entire establishment
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
of imperial Britain with its claim that the second great character-building Greek epic had been written by a woman.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

1946: Critic Erich Auerbach published, in German,...

Writing climate item

1946

Critic Erich Auerbach published, in German, the influential study which became in its English translation, 1953, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. He wrote it at Istanbul, as a Jewish refugee...

February 2007: Social anthropologist Mary Douglas published...

Writing climate item

February 2007

Social anthropologist Mary Douglas published a brief study of literary composition entitled Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition.
“Bowker’s Global Books in Print”. globalbooksinprint.com.
Rothstein, Edward. “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic”. The New York Times: Arts: Connections, 26 Mar. 2007.

By November 2017: Classical scholar Emily Wilson (daughter...

Women writers item

By November 2017

Classical scholar Emily Wilson (daughter and grand-daughter of English-literature scholars Katherine Duncan-Jones and Elsie Duncan-Jones ) became the first woman ever to translate the whole of Homer 's Odyssey into English.
Mason, Wyatt. “The First Woman to Translate the ’Odyssey’ Into English”. The New York Times Magazine, 2 Nov. 2017.

Texts

Homer,. L’Iliade d’Homère. Translator Dacier, Anne, Rigaud, 1711.
Homer,. L’Odyssée d’Homère. Translator Dacier, Anne, Rigaud, 1716, 3 vols.
Homer,. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. Translator Cowper, William, J. Johnson, 1791, 2 vols.
Homer,. The Iliad of Homer. Translator Pope, Alexander, Bernard Lintott, 1720, 6 vols.