This collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to offer perspectives on national identity formation in various European contexts between 1600 and 1815. Contributors challenge the dichotomy between modernists and traditionalists in nationalism studies through an emphasis on continuity rather than ruptures in the shaping of European nations in the period, while also off…
In book 8 of the Odyssey, Odysseus is a guest of the Phaeacians, a mythical people renowned for their knowledge of ships and the sea. In the extract below, a festival that involves athletic games, dancing, and song, the poet Demodocus (“the minstrel” of the opening line) entertains the assembled guests by reciting the myth of how Hephaestus caught his wife Aphrodite in their marriage bed…