Travel and Home in Homer’s Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns

Travel and Home in Homer’s Odyssey and Contemporary Literature brings Homer’s Odyssey together with a selection of contemporary literary texts to produce new readings that reframe, reorient, and ultimately revise aspects of Homer’s iconic story of travel and home. Rather than offering an explicit retelling of the poem, each of these novels prompts us to revisit the relationship between travel and home that Odysseus and Penelope embody, in order to ask new questions of the relationships between travel and home, gender and domesticity. No longer a stable text to which we return time and again to find it the same, the Odyssey, together with the contemporary novels with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.