Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Language & Literature — African & Middle Eastern

Eighteen years of interdisciplinary Homeric scholarship preceded the publication of the present learned volume, which addresses the collaboration of US and European scholars specializing in the humanities (especially classical philology) and computer science. The book centers on the creation of the Homeric Multitext Project (http://www.homermultitext.org), which provides electronic diplomatic editions and high-resolution images and is intended to present systematically the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework. The project itself aims to take into account the multiformity of the poems due to their oral composition, evolved by traditional singers over eternities of generations. Modern-day printed editions of the classics cannot reflect such orality, and even close study of surviving papyrus and medieval manuscripts with their scholia fail to reveal or even suggest the fluidity of the Greek oral epic tradition. Due (Univ. of Houston) was principal Investigator of the research grant projects and coeditor of the project, and she focuses here on the multiformity in surviving sources and the implications for interpreting the reception and transmission of Homeric poetry. Given this important milestone in Homerica, Due argues for a paradigm shift in the study of the poems, and envisions freely accessible digital editions of the works, unconstrained by the boundaries of the printed page.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

It turns out that viewing the comic Roman playwright Plautus (third and second century BCE) through the lens of slavery immensely illuminates both Roman comedy and ancient slavery. Richlin's narrative is brisk, learned, moving, passionate, and funny throughout its 500 pages. Slaves are omnipresent in Plautus; the actors themselves may have been slaves. Plautus witnessed Hannibal's invasion of Italy, and one can scarcely imagine the hardships, displacements, disfigurements, and other travesties that accompanied this and other wars. Richlin examines bodies, beatings, and hunger in the plays along with exchanged insults, shaming, sexual abuse, fantasies of revenge, uppityness, back talk, and sad memories of home. She has an acute eye for how the plays looked in performance--she takes account of meter, music, and gestures--and she provides her own lively translations (she has published several separately). One slave sings, "When I get free, then finally I'll organize a field and a house, and slaves": even a slave does not imagine a world without slaves. Winner of the Society for Classical Studies Goodwin Award, this is a book for scholars and lay readers alike.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Companions devoted to Hesiod are few. Among the more recent is Brill's Companion to Hesiod, ed. by Franco Montanari, Antonios Rengakos, and Christos Tsagalis (2009), which is a fine collection and covers a broad range of subjects. Now The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod more than doubles the number of entries in the Brill companion. Twenty-nine entries written by as many scholars (Sculley and Loney among them) are divided into four broad parts: "Hesiod in Context," "Hesiod's Art," "Hesiod in the Greco-Roman Period," and "Hesiod from Byzantium to Modern Times." As one might expect from Oxford, the contributors are some of the finest scholars in the field. Apart from the essays themselves, the text includes a fine introduction by the editors, a standard index of names and subjects, and a robust "Index Locorum Anitiquorum." The result is an exemplary achievement, comprehensive and diverse, erudite enough to satisfy scholars yet readable enough to be accessible to ambitious nonspecialists--a companion that will find use among not only classicists but also those whose interests include comparative literature and poetry.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.