The language of Achilles, and other papers /

Parry died young (43) in 1971. Twelve ebullient scholarly papers, two book introductions, and four incisive book reviews have been selected and presented in chronological order to disseminate his literary insights and forceful polemics. Parry mightily influenced research on three ancient authors. First, he isolated and identified the reticent Thucydides' emotional content and sketched the poetics of his penetrating historical prose. Second, Parry marked Virgil's somber insistence in the Aeneid on the pathetic costs to persons and places of irresistible, impersonal forces of "progress." Finally, appreciating the value and the limitations of his father Milman's revolutionary studies of oral, traditional poetry, Parry resurrected the once wan possibility of Homeric literary criticism, including the existence of characterization in formulaic epic. These three once-radical theoretical positions are now near orthodoxy, but the papers' scattering in journals has heretofore obscured Parry's achievement. One may nevertheless regret the awesome price of these reprinted papers, more than two thirds of which are already resident in decent college libraries. Recommended for (affluent) libraries serving upper-division undergraduates and advanced students in Classical literatures. -D. Lateiner, Ohio Wesleyan University