The Iliad has had a far-reaching impact on Western literature and culture, inspiring writers, artists and classical composers across the ages. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an introduction by classicist, writer and broadcaster Natalie Haynes, author of A Thousand Ships and host of her own BBC Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands up for the Classics. Paris, a Trojan prince, wins Helen as his prize for judging a beauty contest between three goddesses, and abducts her from her Greek husband Menelaos. The Greeks, enraged by his audacity, sail to Troy and begin a long siege of the city. The Iliad is set in the tenth year of the war. Achilles - the greatest Greek warrior - is angry with his commander, Agamemnon, for failing to show him respect. He refuses to fight any longer, which is catastrophic for the Greeks, and results in personal tragedy for Achilles, too. With themes of war, rage, grief and love, The Iliad remains powerful and enthralling more than 2,700 years after it was composed. This edition is translated into prose by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers.

A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts provides an introduction to the language and concepts employed in bibliographical studies and textual scholarship as they pertain to early modern manuscripts and printed texts * Winner, Honourable Mention for Literature, Language and Linguistics, American Publishers Prose Awards, 2010 * Based almost exclusively on new primary research * Explains the complex process of viewing documents as artefacts, showing readers how to describe documents properly and how to read their physical properties * Demonstrates how to use the information gleaned as a tool for studying the transmission of literary documents * Makes clear why such matters are important and the purposes to which such information is put * Features illustrations that are carefully chosen for their unfamiliarity in order to keep the discussion fresh

In nineteenth-century Italy, a woman's place was considered to be in the domestic sphere, devoted to family life. But during the Risorgimento and the years following Unification, economic, political and social changes enabled women progressively to engage in pursuits that had previously been the exclusive domain of men. This book traces some of the steps of this shift in cultural perception. Covering the period from the Unification of Italy in 1861 to the First World War, the volume brings together new perspectives on women, culture and gender in ten original interdisciplinary chapters that explore a variety of subjects, including motherhood and spinsterhood, women's relationship with the Italian language, emigration and brigantaggio, patriotism and travel writing, acting and theatre management, film-making, and political ideas and female solidarity.

This collection of essays is a seminal contribution to the establishment of translation theory within the field of Russian literature and culture. It brings together the work of established academics and younger scholars from the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, Sweden and France in an area of academic study that has been largely neglected in the Anglophone world. The essays in the volume are linked by the conviction that the introduction of any new text into a host culture should always be considered in conjunction with adjustments to prevailing conventions within that culture. The case studies in the collection, which cover literary translation in Russia from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, demonstrate how Russian culture has interpreted and accommodated translated texts, and how translators and publishers have used translation as a means of responding to the literary, social and political conditions of their times. In integrating research in the area of translated works more closely into the study of Russian literature and culture generally, this publication represents an important development in current research.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: - Sheila Murnaghan's new translation of the great Greek tragedy of betrayal, revenge, and murder, set in Corinth in the fifth-century B.C.E. - A full introduction and explanatory annotations by Sheila Murnaghan. - Ancient perspectives on the unforgettable plot from Xenophon, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Seneca. - Seminal essays on Medea by P. E. Easterling, Helene P. Foley, and Edith Hall. - A Selected Bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format--annotated text, contexts, and criticism--helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Written shortly after the capture of the Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca, Peru, True Account of the Conquest of Peru by Francisco de Jerez, Francisco Pizarro's secretary and notary, is the most influential of the early accounts of the conquest of the Andean region. This fascinating text brings to life Pizarro and his men's arrival in the central Andes of South America and their capture of Inca Atahualpa, the ruler of one of the continent's largest and most powerful civilizations. Injured during the massacre that took place immediately after the capture of Atahualpa but wealthy thanks to his share of the ransom offered by Atahualpa for his freedom, Jerez published his account of the events just months after arriving in Seville in 1534. The present edition is based on the English translation Reports on the Discovery of Peru published by Clement Markham in London in 1872 and also includes his translations of the Letter from Hernando Pizarro to the Royal Audience of Santo Domingo and the Report on the Distribution of the Ransom of Atahualpa by Pedro Sancho. This volume is an invaluable tool for scholars, professors, and students of Latin American studies and students of history and literature interested in the history of the conuest of the Andean region as well as a must read for those fascinated by the history, civilization, and culture of Peru and the Andean region in particular and the Americas in general.

The Tale of Princess Fatima - the only Arabic epic named for a woman - recounts the thrilling adventures of a legendary warrior known throughout the Middle East. After being abandoned at birth, Princess Fatima, otherwise known as Dhat al-Himma, must rely on strength and cunning to take her to the head of a powerful army. Bitter tribal warfare, stealthy ambushes and globetrotting pursuits will eventually lead Fatima back to face her father, and to confront another fierce warrior woman in a mighty showdown . . . Published in English for the first time, The Tale of Princess Fatima wonderfully recreates medieval Arabia and introduces a formidable new feminist icon.

Grattius' Cynegetica, a Roman didactic poem on hunting with dogs, is the author's only surviving work, though it reaches us now in an incomplete form. Thanks to a passing reference by Ovid in his Epistulae ex Ponto it can confidently be dated to the Augustan period, and yet while his literary contemporaries have been and continue to be subjects of academic scrutiny, Grattius is seldom read and remains almost completely unappreciated in classical and literary scholarship. This volume is the first book-length study of Grattius in English or any other language and sets out to rehabilitate the neglected poet by making him and his work accessible to a wide audience. Prefaced by an introduction to the poet and his work, as well as the Latin text of Cynegetica and a new English translation, it presents a broad collection of interpretive essays from an international team of scholars. These essays explore the poem within its literary, intellectual, and socio-political contexts and look forward to Grattius' (more charitable) posthumous reception in Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As a whole they aim to reveal his enduring relevance for the tradition of didactic poetry and the study of other Augustan poetry and culture, and to provide an impetus for future discussions.

The letters of Seneca are uniquely engaging among the works that have survived from antiquity. They offer an urgent guide to Stoic self-improvement but also cast light on Roman attitudes towards slavery, gladiatorial combat and suicide. This selection of letters conveys their range and variety, with a particular focus on letters from the earlier part of the collection. As well as a general introduction, it features a brief introductory essay on each letter, which draws out its themes and sets it in context. The commentary explains the more challenging aspects of Seneca's Latin. It also casts light on his engagement with Stoic (and Epicurean) ideas, on the historical context within which the letters were written and on their literary sophistication. This edition will be invaluable for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of Seneca's moral and intellectual development.

This collection of papers contains some 60 articles selected from the works of the philologist Ernst Vogt. They dealwith a variety of very different aspects of the study of ancient languages, for example the history of literary forms and genres, Greek literature of the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods, the history of transmission and reception, or the history of classical philology. All of the texts have been checked and additions or amendments made.

Ammianus is regarded as the greatest historian of late antiquity. Yet his geographic and ethnographic digressions were long underestimated as examples offeigned eruditionand as undue interruptions to the historical narrative. The author of this volume believes that the key to understanding Ammianus s work as a whole lies in his teaching of classical rhetoric, his metaphoric reading of landscapes, and the creation of spaces for memory and counterworlds to the Imperium Romanum. In this way, historical understanding and digressions concerning geographic knowledge must be viewed as interdependent features of the text. The author thus casts a new light on Ammianus s literary achievements."

This book analyses articulations of cultural identity in the work of the twentieth-century Polish poet Jerzy Harasymowicz, concentrating on the ways in which his shifting perspectives on the Carpathian Lemko Region are used to address the dilemmas of power, hybridity and interethnic contact. Set against the background of communist Poland, the poems examined here challenge official narratives of identity, while exploring the possibilities and limits of self-creation in poetry. Constituting the first post-1989 reading of Harasymowicz's verse, free from the constraints imposed by political censorship, this book provides a reinterpretation of the poet's work and reconsiders his contested legacy. By framing the discussion within the context of postcolonial studies, the author explores the usefulness of this approach in reassessing cultural representations of Polish national identity and raises broader questions about the ability of postcolonial theory to redefine the established notions of national literature and culture.

Claude McKay's Liberating Narrative: Russian and Anglophone Caribbean Literary Connections examines McKay's search for an original form of literary expression that started in Jamaica and continued in his subsequent travels abroad. Newly found research pertaining to his presence in several Russian periodicals, magazines, and literary diaries brings new light to the writer's contribution to the Soviet understanding of African American and Caribbean issues and his possible influence on Yevgeny Zamyatin, the writer he met during his 1922 - 1923 visit to Russia. The primary focus of this book is Claude McKay and his positive reception of Alexander Pushkin, Feodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy, the nineteenth-century Russian writers who influenced his literary career and enabled him to find a solution to his dilemma of a dual Caribbean identity. The secondary focus of this book is the analysis of McKay's affinity with his Russian literary predecessors and with C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissiere, his Trinidadian contemporaries, who also acknowledged the importance of Russian writers in their artistic development. The book discusses McKay as a precursor of Russian and Anglophone Caribbean links and presents a comparative analysis of cross-racial, cross-national, and cross-cultural alliances between these two distinct yet similar types of literature. Claude McKay's Liberating Narrative is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate courses in Caribbean and comparative literature at North American, European, Caribbean, and African universities.

An industrial port of a war-torn city. Women survivors wait to be shipped abroad. Officials come and go. A grandmother, once Queen, watches as her remaining family are taken from her one by one. The city burns around them. Euripides' great anti-war tragedy is published in Don Taylor's translation to coincide with the National Theatre's production directed by Katie Mitchell in the Lyttelton auditorium. This edition of the play features an introduction by the translator setting the play in its historical and dramaturgical context.

In this first introduction to Plautus' Trinummus, students and non-specialists alike are guided through the themes, context, and enduring humor of this Roman comedy. The play portrays the story of an elaborate game of keep-away involving a hidden treasure, a hot-blooded spendthrift youth, his pious sister, her would-be fiancee, a con-artist, and the most unlikely of comic schemers-a group of overly pious old men. The conflict of the plot focuses on whether a pair of old men can help their absent friend Charmides by getting a dowry to his daughter without Charmides' wastrel son Lesbonicus first spending the money on the usual comic debauchery. The money is taken from a treasure hidden by Charmides when he left and a sycophant is hired to pretend to bring letters from Charmides along with the cash for the dowry. Comic confusion ensues when Charmides returns from abroad just in time to intercept the con-artist and overturn the scheming of his friends. Long neglected, Trinummus is one of many Plautine plays that is experiencing a resurgence. This volume elucidates the humor of the play, which is largely based on parody and clever inversions of typical characters and situations from Roman comedy. This discussion is accompanied by an examination of the religious, social, and historical context of the play, as well as its modern reception. The genuine humor of Trinummus has something to say to modern readers, as it showcases how parody can skewer those engaged in pompous moral posturing and presents readers with a playwright who astutely views issues of imperialism and moral justification through a comic lens.