Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems

by Thomas R. Walsh

Overview

Anger is central to the Homeric epic, but few scholarly interventions have probed Homer's language beyond the study of the Iliad's first word: menis. Yet Homer uses over a dozen words for anger. Fighting Words and Feuding Words engages the powerful tools of Homeric poetic analysis and the anthropological study of emotion in an analysis of two anger terms highlighted in the Iliad by the Achaean prophet Calchas. Walsh argues that kotos and kholos locate two focal points for the study of aggression in Homeric poetry, the first presenting Homer's terms for feud and the second providing the native terms that designates the martial violence highlighted by the Homeric tradition. After focusing on these two terms as used in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Walsh concludes by addressing some post-Homeric and comparative implications of Homeric anger.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739155004
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/11/2005
Series:	Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	316
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Thomas R. Walsh is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Foreword
Chapter 2 Introduction: Homeric Anger
Part 3 Feuding Words
Chapter 4 The Prophet Defines
Chapter 5 Forms and Formulae
Chapter 6 Kotos and Social Status
Chapter 7 Anger's History: Kotos and Etymology
Chapter 8 Anger's Aggression: The Wrath of Feud
Part 9 Fighting Words
Chapter 10 Helen's Cure and the End of Anger
Chapter 11 The Beginning of Kholos
Chapter 12 Fighting Words
Chapter 13 Fighting Deeds
Chapter 14 The Embassy, Kholos, and the Illiad's Genre
Chapter 15 The Cultural Poetics of Kholos in the Illiad
Chapter 16 Conclusions and a Comparison