Atlantis Otherwise expands the study of the African diaspora by focusing on postcolonial literary expressions from Latin America and Africa. The book studies the presence of classical references in texts written by writers (black and non-black) who are committed to the articulation of the fragmented history of the African experience from the Middle Passage to the present outside of Euro-centric views. Consequently, this book addresses the silencing of the African Diaspora within the official discourses of Latin America and Hispanic Africa, as well as the limitations that linguistic and geographic boundaries have imposed upon scholarship. The contributors address questions related to the categories of race and cultural identity by analyzing a diverse body of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Hispanic receptions of classical literature and its imaginaries. Literary texts in Spanish and Portuguese written in countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Equatorial Guinea provide the opportunity for a transnational and trans-linguistic examination of the use of classical tropes and themes in twentieth-century drama, fiction, folklore studies, and narrative.

The essays in this collection addresses questions of intense interest in Homeric studies today: the questions of performance and poet-audience interaction, especially as depicted in idealized performances within the Iliad and the Odyssey; the ways in which epic incorporates material of diverse genres, such as women's laments, blame poetry, or folk tales; how the ideological balance of epic can change and be influenced by 'alternative ideologies' introduced through the incorporation of new material; the implications of the continuity of tradition for etymological studies; and how the traditional nature of epic affects textual criticism. The essays differ in focus and method, but all share one fundamental approach to Homer: an understanding of the Homeric tradition as a poetic system that expresses and preserves what is culturally important and a view of the Homeric epics as instances of a cultural tradition which they attempt to explore through the epics themselves and through the comparative, anthropological, and linguistic evidence they bring to bear on these texts. A unique collection that explores Homeric poetry through a variety of tools and approaches linguistics, philology, cultural anthropology, sociology, textual criticism, and archeology this volume will be of interest to all scholars and students of oral poetry and Classical literature.

Each of the suitors in the Odyssey is eager to become the king of Ithaca by marrying Penelope and disqualifying Telemachus from his rightful royal inheritance. Their words are contentious, censorious, and intent on marking Odysseus’ son as unfit for kingship. However, in keeping with other reversals in the Odyssey, it is the suitors who are shown to be unfit to rule. In Blemished Kings, Andrea Kouklanakis interprets the language of the suitors—their fighting words—as Homeric expressions of reproach and critique against unsuitable kings. She suggests that the suitors’ disparaging expressions, and the refutations they provoke from Telemachus and from Odysseus himself, rest on the ideology whereby a blemished king cannot rule. Therefore, the suitors vehemently reject Telemachus’ suggestion that they are to be blamed. She shows that in the Odyssey there is linguistic and semantic evidence for the concept that blame poetry can physically blemish, hence disqualify, rulers. In her comparative approach, Kouklanakis looks towards the regulatory role of satire in early Irish law and myth, particularly the taboo against a blemished-face king, offering thereby a socio-poetic context for the suitors’ struggles for kingship.