Jonathan L. Ready - Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad [2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: April 11, 2011
Jonathan L. Ready offers the first comprehensive examination of Homer's similes in the Iliad as arenas of heroic competition. This study concentrates primarily on similes spoken by Homeric characters. The first to offer a sustained exploration of such similes, Ready shows how characters are made to contest through and over simile not only with one another but also with the narrator. Ready investigates the narrator's similes as well. He demonstrates that Homer amplifies the feat of a successful warrior by providing a competitive orientation to sequences of similes used to describe battles. He also offers a new interpretation of Homer's extended similes as a means for the poet to imagine his characters as competitors for his attention. Throughout this study, Ready makes innovative use of approaches from both Homeric studies and narratology that have not yet been applied to the analysis of Homer's similes.

Book Description II
Jonathan L. Ready demonstrates that Homer uses similes in the Iliad as arenas of heroic competition. In addition to presenting the first sustained critical exploration of similes spoken by characters, Ready investigates similes the narrator uses to describe battles and provides a new way to account for that most peculiar feature of many Homeric similes, their length.

About the Author
Jonathan L. Ready is an assistant professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece (2007) and of a number of articles that have appeared in classics journals including Transactions of the American Philological Association and the American Journal of Philology.