The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the publication of an astonishing number of novels based on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Adapting a term from Henry Fielding, the article reads A Thousand Ships as a “tragic epic poem in prose”– a prose epic for a twenty-first-century readership. A Thousand Ships, which narrates the tragic stories of the women affected by the Trojan War, adheres to the rules of this new sort of epic.
In this novel, meta-epic reflection takes centre stage through the character of Calliope, the ancient muse of epic poetry, who advocates a reform of her own genre: dissatisfied with its patriarchal traditions, Calliope calls for a new kind of epic which foregrounds the fates of the female characters. Subsequently, it focusses on Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships(2019) as an ambivalent approach to the epic. It briefly discusses Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic (2017) as an affirmative take on the ancient genre and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) as a subversive one. In its main part, the article distinguishes between three modes of meta-epic reflection in the contemporary novel.
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