The Return of Ulysses

Edith Hall has written a book many have long been waiting for, a smart, sophisticated, and hugely entertaining cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey spanning nearly three millennia of its reception and influence within world culture. A marvel of collection, association, and analysis, the book yields new discoveries on every page. In no other treatment of the enduring figure of Odysseus does Dante rub shoulders with Dr. Who, Adorno and Bakhtin with John Ford and Clint Eastwood. Hall is superb at digging into the depths of the Odyssean character to find what makes the polytropic Greek so internationally indestructible. A great delight to read, the book is lucid, appealingly written, fast, funny, and full of enlightening details. It is at once a serious investigation of a cultural phenomenon, an extended education in the humanities, and an invitation to a lifetime of trailing its seafaring hero.

Only Edith Hall could have written this richly engaging and distinctive book. She covers a breathtaking range of material, from the highest of high culture to the camp, cartoonish, and frankly weird; from Europe to the U.S.A. to Africa and the Far East; and from literature to film and opera. Throughout this tour of the huge variety of responses that there have been to the Odyssey, a powerful argument emerges about the appeal and longevity of the text which reveals all the critical and political flair that we have come to expect of this author. It is all conveyed with the infectious excitement and clarity of a brilliant performer. The Return of Ulysses represents a major contribution to how we assess the continuing influence of Homer in modern culture.

Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses undertakes the formidable task of surveying the cultural reception of the Odyssey from late antiquity to the present. By tracing echoes of the poem in literature, painting, and music, noting its impact upon discourses of race, class, gender, and colonization, and identifying reflections of the myth in modern systems of philosophical and psychological thought, the author shows that it is arguably the founding text of Western civilization. Today, the Odyssey has lost none of its cultural power or resonance. Having found a new home in popular culture and contemporary media, it speaks with especial urgency to non-Western émigrés in a culturally fragmented world. Hall’s rich appraisal will be greeted as the definitive investigation of a fascinating and many-sided phenomenon.

In The Return of Ulysses, Edith Hall has given us a brilliant, cultured, and far-reaching tool for interpreting the Odyssey, and for reading, watching, and listening to the words, images, and music that have come into being in the refracted light of the Homeric poem. Taking us from Virgil to Cavafy, Circe to Dorothy—the first female quester—and Polyphemus to Batman, Hall’s work ranges in masterful ways among the times, places, ideologies, and theoretical frameworks that constitute the reception world of the epic to which all later epics are generically most connected. The book is written in a lively, witty, and hip style, wearing with impressive ease its enormous learning and cultural breadth. Edith Hall points the way, sometimes with elaboration, often with suggestive brevity, to the many pathways leading from and back to this familiar but always changing poem. The Return of Ulysses does not disappoint and has much to offer that will both teach and delight.