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Rewriting the Odyssey in the twenty-first century: Mary Zimmerman's Odyssey and Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad.

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From: College Literature
Date: 20070322
Author:Suzuki, Mihoko

With Athena as its presiding deity The Odyssey has been associated with the feminine even before the rise of feminist criticism in the last decades of the twentieth century. (1) Samuel Butler claimed in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) that the author disguised herself in the character of Nausicaa; in Homer's Daughter (1955) Robert Graves followed Butler in imagining Nausicaa, here a priestess of Athena, as the protagonist who discomfits her 112 suitors. (2) Andrew Dalby's recent Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic argues that both the Iliad and the Odyssey were ...

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