Reviews

"This is a sparkling study of the Odyssey. It offers insightful interpretations of a series of passages from the poem (embracing at times Hesiod, Ibycus and more), while presenting also a much larger argument about the interplay of poetic discourse and archaic notions of the world around."--Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"This is an excellent book, giving us a better sense than ever before of the Greek sense of wonderment and adventure as they came to know the entire Mediterranean Sea in the eighth century BC. It will be required reading for literary critics, comparativists, historians, and archaeologists alike."--Ian Morris, Stanford University
"Carol Dougherty's The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer's Odyssey moves beyond the work of the French classicists Pierre Vidal-Naquet and François Hartog to locate the synchronic structural oppositions that organize the Homeric imagination in an evolving historical reality. Odysseus' linked roles as traveler, craftsman, and poet permit him to negotiate issues central to the world of Archaic Greece concerning exchange (both
gift-exchange and commerce), the foundation of new colonies, and the revitalization of a traditional society through foreign contacts."--Helene P. Foley, Barnard College, Columbia University
"This is a sparkling study of the Odyssey. It offers insightful interpretations of a series of passages from the poem (embracing at times Hesiod, Ibycus and more), while presenting also a much larger argument about the interplay of poetic discourse and archaic notions of the world around."--Bryn Mawr Classical Review