Homer

"This is a book about Homer-who probably never existed but nonetheless survives as one of the most important authors in Western literature. Homer, like Shakespeare, has never ceased to be an object of fascination. Surely the greatest attraction to Homer lies not in his greatness as an author but in his utter mystery. Was there really a man, an author named Homer? In this corner are those who think that there was and that there existed Ur texts of The Iliad and The Odyssey. On the other side are those who view the blind Homer as an icon, a legend created and circulated in later centuries when values of authorship were finally codified. As one of the foremost Homerists, James Porter is uniquely qualified to write about these issues. It is important to stress that his book is not a reception study of the poetry of Homer. Rather, it is written for a broad array of general readers, scholars, and cultural pundits, and it explores the cultural value and, in a narrower sense, the history of a particular value in our culture (represented by "Homer"). Porter sees this value as a particular fascination and an uncertain cipher around which questions of meaning and identity come to be constructed. Porter suspects that with Homer the ancients and moderns have made a rather telling choice of object for contention, one that ceaselessly authorizes the imaginative work of culture"--