| What would happen to Odysseus if he found himself in our modern world? And what has the discipline of Classics to do with colonialism?
By considering works by three key twentieth-century writers, we’ll explore their varied responses to these questions and ask what heroism looks like in the twenty-first century. From Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros, set in the St Lucian fishing village of Gros Islet, to Toni Morrison’s tale of a female questing hero in Sula, and Ralph Ellison’s pre-Civil Rights era novel Invisible Man, we find three very different responses to Homer’s epic, each recasting the ancient Greek myths as tales that reflect on the African diaspora. |
