Homer's Traditional Art
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press; Penn State University Press
Published: June 1999
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 363
ISBN-13: 9780271018706
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers; Poetry & poets: classical, early & medieval; Greek Literature; Oral And Folk Literature; Literary Criticism; Poetry; Ancient (Classical) Greek; Literature: Classics; Ancient Greece; Ancient and Classical; Epic poetry, Greek; Greece; History and criticism; Homer; Oral tradition; Oral-formulaic analysis; Technique
Description: In Homer's Traditional Art, Foley addresses three crucially interlocking areas that lead us to a fuller appreciation of the Homeric poems. He first explores the reality of Homer as their actual author, examining historical and comparative evidence to propose that "Homer" is a legendary and anthropomorphic figure rather than a real-life author. He next presents the poetic tradition as a specialized and highly resonant language bristling with idiomatic implication.

Finally, he looks at Homer's overall artistic achievement, showing that it is best evaluated via a poetics aimed specifically at works that emerge from oral tradition. Homer's Traditional Art represents a disentangling of the interwoven strands of orality, textuality, and verbal art. It shows how we can learn to appreciate how Homer's art succeeds not in spite of the oral tradition in which it was composed but rather through its unique agency.