Stephanie Nelson – författare

The Works and Days of Hesiod and Vergil's Georgics are fundamental texts in the classical canon. Here Nelson brings them together with a metaphysical eye, showing how the two writers each viewed the farming lifestyle as a system of belief unto itself. She represents the ethos of the farm as a way of understanding the earth, the gods, and man between them in vital relation to each other. This study also includes a sparkling new translation of Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene.

In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, but also about its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Vergil, Nelson argues, deliberately modeled his poem upon the Works and Days, and did so in order to reveal that his is a very different vision. Hesiod saw the hardship in farming; Vergil sees its violence as well. Farming is for him both our life within nature, and also our battle against her. Against the background of Hesiods poem, which found a single meaning for human life, Vergil thus creates a split vision and suggests that human beings may be radically alienated from both nature and the divine. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense.

A comparative study of two classicliterary works, from a specialist in Joyce and HomerTime and Identity in“Ulysses” and the “Odyssey” offers a unique in-depth comparative study oftwo classic literary works, examiningessential themes such as change, the self, and humans’ dependence on andisolation from others. Stephanie Nelson shows that in these texts, both Joyceand Homer address identity by looking at the paradox of time—that people areconstantly changing yet remain the same across the years. In Nelson’s analysis, both Ulyssesand the Odyssey explore dichotomiessuch as the permanence of names and shifting of stories, independence andconnection, and linear and cyclical narrative. Nelson discusses Homer’scontrast of ordinary to mythic time alongside Joyce’s contrast of “clocktime”to experienced time. She analyzes the characters Odysseus and Leopold Bloom,alienated from their previous selves; Telemachus and Stephen Dedalus, trappedby the past; and Penelope and Molly Bloom, able to recast time through weaving,storytelling, and memory. These concepts are also explored through Joyce’sradically different narrative styles and Homer’s timeless world of the gods.Nelson’s thoroughknowledge of ancient Greece, Joyce, narratology, oral tradition, andtranslation results in a volume that speaks across literary specializations. Thisbook makes the case that Ulysses andthe Odyssey should be read togetherand that each work highlights and clarifies aspects of the other. As Joyce’s charactersare portrayed as both flux and fixity, readers will see Homer’s hero fight hisway out of myth and back into the constant changes of human existence.