Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender

Homeric Voices is a study, from a compositional point of view, of the substantial speeches and exchanges of speech that Homer depicts in his songs. Drawing on research in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive psychology, Elizabeth Minchin considers the words that Homer attributes to his characters from two perspectives, as cognitive and as social phenomena. She asks how the poet worked with memory to generate the speech forms that he represents; and how Homeric speech constructs and reveals the social hierarchies that are bound up with age, status, and gender--with particular interest in gender--in the world of the poems.