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The Odyssey Essay | Critical Essay #1

This Study Guide consists of approximately 101 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Odyssey.
This section contains 1,944 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page)
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The Odyssey Critical Essay #1

In the following essay, Spires focuses on the human element and scale of the Odyssey as an important reason for its continued popularity.

As Peter Jones remarks in his 1991introduction to E. V. Rieu's translation of the poem, "The Odyssey-the return of Odysseus from Troy to reclaim his threatened home on Ithaca-is a superb story, rich in character, adventure and incident. . . and making the household, rather than the battlefield, the centre of its world" (p. xi). That, I think, goes a long way toward explaining its perennial appeal, even some 3,000 years after it was written.

That is not to say that the Iliad, Homer's other epic poem, is not also a superb story: just a different kind of story. If Homer's works were operas, the Iliad would be something out of Wagner: rather heavy, highly formalized, and full of deep...
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This section contains 1,944 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our The Odyssey Study Guide
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The Odyssey from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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