Suites d’Homère de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance

This book is the result of an international conference organized by the University of Tours in May 2021. It sets out to explore the notion of sequel in literature by examining the Homeric poems. While Gérard Genette evoked Homer in a considerable number of pages of his essay Palimpsestes, he however paid particular attention to forms of continuity from the front, from the back and from the sides, afterwards and sideways, which seem to make Homeric material the first victim of the cyclical additions that appear to constitute the ineluctable future of the great epics. In recent decades, however, these positions have been strongly nuanced and the time was ripe, therefore, for diachronic reflection on the validity of the notion of the ‘Homeric sequel’ by testing the meaning it has in various geographical and cultural contexts, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The authors of this volume contribute to the discussion of the literary concept of ‘continuation’ and offer a wide panorama of the poet's fruitful reception over time; they do so without neglecting the phenomena of transformation made possible by the survival of a mythology of Homeric origin which exists despite the absence of a direct reading of the Greek texts.