Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Book That Launched a Thousand Queries...

I'll have to review the book before I give an official opinion, but I found this interesting as I was trolling sites today. The attached article, by Emily Wilson, is somewhat paltry, but the book does sound intriguing:

Dalby writes in Rediscovering Homer, that Homer was possibly a woman:

"... Dalby deploys a much stronger set of arguments for female authorship, based on comparative anthropological analysis of how women preserve songs, stories, and folk tales. Women are often the ones who retain linguistic and literary traditions for the longest time. Certainly, there is no evidence whatsoever of female epic poets in archaic Greece. When poets are described or alluded to in the Homeric poems themselves, they are always men. This fact alone makes Dalby's hypothesis implausible. On the other hand, there certainly were female lyric poets—Sappho, for example."

This passage seems a bit contradictory to me, which is precisely why I'd like to review the book and share my opinions. Of course, I'm broke at the moment so I'll have to find it at the library or ask for it for Christmas. But once I read it, I'll share...

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