These assumptions, once uncovered, are what I compare to the more recent gender-focused scholarship on the Odyssey. My use of it is not to revive or refute his conclusions, but rather to examine how assumptions about gender, authorship, and texts are used in his arguments. Butler’s book seems to have sold well and been widely read in his time, but the idea of female authorship of the Odyssey did not gain acceptance. It is this part of his argument that he must defend in a detailed argument, and the part that seems, based on Butler’s own account and that of Benjamin Farrington in 1929, to have elicited the greatest response from other readers of Homer. But surely the most controversial of his claims is that the author of the Odyssey was a woman, an “authoress” in his terms, and moreover, that she was “a woman-young, headstrong, and unmarried” (as the title to his chapter VII phrases it). Butler spends several chapters developing and defending those conclusions. He argues based on the landscape descriptions in the poem that the author of the Odyssey lived in Sicily (Trapani, specifically), and that its date of composition was between 10 BC.
He claims that the author of the Odyssey is a different person from the author of the Iliad (a position he portrays as gaining acceptance) and also that the author was a single person, as he argues against what he calls the popular “Wolfian heresy” that would give each poem multiple authors (Butler 1897:2–3). Quaker, "In defence of the A.N.C." on the African National Congress, clippings, documents and letters on water supply in Cradock (1903-48, including manuscript poems on water (published 1916) and other themes (one critical of General Hertzog), a large photograph of the opening of the first reservoir, and a pamphlet, Water Supply Investigation (Cradock: Cradock Municpality, 1920), correspondence with Africans, 1934-77, and Group Areas Act of apartheid.In his book Butler makes several claims about the author of the Odyssey that could be controversial. Subjects include providing books for black schools and bursaries for black students, Oxfam, Quaker relief in Cradock (1965), "Location Sketches" (15 leaves based on Africans she knew), Easter procession by churches, 1953, "Work for racial harmony" (1954), her articles on war/military training (1954-5), some published in S.A.
Correspondents include her niece Joan, Keith Cramer, lawyer in Cradock editor of Midlands News (November 1928, on visit of black leader R.V. The Mary Emma Butler papers contain correspondence, photographs and articles by her, newspaper clippings chiefly from Midland News (1903-70, notably a regular column "The Non-White Community") on black education, sport, personalities, related documents.
0 kommentar(er)
