The following are the bibliographies for the Odyssey:

1. Ready, Jonathan L. “ATU 974 The Homecoming Husband, the Returns of Odysseus, and the End of Odyssey 21.” Arethusa 47, no. 3 (2014): 265-285.

2. Purves, Alex. “Unmarked Space: Odysseus and the Inland Journey.” Arethusa 39, no. 1 (2006): 1-20.

3. Schur, David. “The Silence of Homer’s Sirens.” Arethusa 47, no. 1 (2014): 1-17.

4. Bonifazi, Anna. “Inquiring into Nostos and Its Cognates.” American Journal of Philology 130, no. 4 (2009): 481-510.

5. Alexopoulou, Marigo. The Theme of Returning Home in Ancient Greek Literature: The Nostos of the Epic Heroes. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009.

6. Haller, Benjamin S. “Dolios in Odyssey 4 and 24: Penelope’s Plotting and Alternative Narratives of Odysseus’s νόστος.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 143, no. 2 (2013): 263-292.

7. Baker, Elton T. E., and Christensen, Joel P. “Odysseus’s nostos and the Odyssey’s nostoi.” Philologia Antiqua 7 (2014): 85-110.

8. Nugent, B. Pauline. “The Sounds of Sirens; Odyssey 12. 184-91.” College Literature 35, no. 4 (2008): 45-54.

9. Katz, Marylin A. “Coming Home/Going Home (Books 13, 15, 16).” In Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the “Odyssey”, 54-76. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

10. Segal, Charles. “Transition and Ritual in Odysseus’s Return.” In Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the “Odyssey”, 65-84. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018.

11. Bassi, Karen. “Nostos, Domos, and the Architecture of the Ancient Stage.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 98, no. 3 (1999): 415-449.

12. Loney, Alexander C. “Narrative Revenge and the Poetics of Justice in the Odyssey: A Study on Tisis.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2010.

Writings for the bibliographies

1)This article examines Odysseus’s nostos in relations to the narrative tradition of homecoming stories throughout the world. The author argues through details in the plot of the Odyssey how this epic of homecoming fits into the international story type ATU 974. Being a story about a husband arriving in time before his wife must remarry, the Odyssey fits perfectly with the classified plot structure of ATU 974. Reviewing various epic narrations in other cultures, such as the story of Prince Marko from the Balkans and the Mahābhārata from India, the author is able to illustrate how the Odyssey is, in various aspects, similar to these tales from civilizations vastly different from the Achaean world. In anthropological terms, these finding of Odysseus’s homecoming narrative may suggest intensive cross-cultural trades embodied behind the sharing of a similar type of story, a sign of transition from the constant warfare of the Iron Age to a more settled down, peaceful overview of the world. From a literary perspective, the conclusion that the Odyssey fits into the international story type ATU 974 suggests its embodiment of universal homecoming related themes. A theme discussed by the article is the restoration of Odysseus’s role as a husband. Settling Odysseus into appropriate masculine roles and Penelope feminine roles reaffirm the anthropologic context of a global social transition from warrior to agricultural societies, characterized by the formation of nuclear families and clear divisions of labor between the two sexes. On the other hand, settling Odysseus into the role as the husband links to the idea of gaining kleos by restored power. In ATU 974, glory is not automatically entitled to the king as he returns home. It is only through “challenging the competitors”, fighting the suitors in Odysseus’s context, that the hero ends the story with a regained status. Focusing mainly on the last book of the Odyssey, the article explores how nostos restores Odysseus’s power by enabling two actions—reunion with his wife and punishment of suitors.

3)Different from the other articles is this article’s conceptual and semantic focus of what “homecoming” really means. Focusing mostly on the Homeric tales, the author links nostos to how it is mostly embodied. For the Achaeans, “homecoming” is not a simple completion of kleos. It involves the endurance of hardships along the way with the goal of survival. The article points out how the process of nostos could also be a pain for characters in the Odyssey. The journey home for Odysseus is never destined to be a journey where everyone could be safe and sound. Multiple incidences in the journey, such as the attacks from Polyphemus, the giants, and Scylla, leads to death of some crew members and the mourning of others. As noted by the article, this pain of losing in homecoming summarizes itself perfectly in the first few lines of the Odyssey, where Homer described Odysseus’s inability to “save them [the men], hard as he tried” to be a “suffering deep in his heart”. While pointing out in a semantics way that “nostos” is, in its etymology, linked to the idea of “saving oneself”, the article illustrates a multidirectional responsibility on the part of Odysseus to not only stay alive, but also achieve the nostos of his crew. In this respect, the article links another layer of meaning behind Odysseus’s homecoming—the responsibility as a leader. Odysseus’s homecoming can be viewed from  the lens of a leadership lesson. The sad, lonely state Odysseus is in at the journey’s end lies in his lack of qualities as a good leader, especially his inability to effectively communicate with his crew. Though arguably the punishment of fate, the ship’s accidental leaving of Ithaca after its brief arrival results from Odysseus not telling the crew what is contained in Aeolus’s bag. Similarly, Odysseus’s weak leadership skills are also accountable for the deaths of his crew as a result of Helios’s punishment. Hardly convinced by Odysseus’s pleading, the crew listened to Eurylochus instead and ate the sacred cows of Helios. The triumph of Eurylochus’s arguments over Odysseus’s illustrates the failure of Odysseus to carry on the responsibility of bringing everybody on the ship home. Overall, as an etymological analysis of nostos, this article explains how nostos means pain and saving oneself in ancient Greece, suggesting how Odysseus’s leadership is responsible for the homecoming—or rather failure of homecoming—of his crew.

9)In this article, the author constructs the relationship between Odysseus’s nostos with Penelope’s quality of loyalty. The article provides several parallelisms between themen and women in Odyssey, especially the natural juxtaposition between Penelope and Clytemnestra when Odysseus visits the underworld. While warning Odysseus about the “wife at home”, Agamemnon famously remarked how Penelope “will not” betray and murder Odysseus in the same way Clytemnestra murdered him. The contrast between Penelope and her foil, Clytemnestra, illustrates what lies most innately behind Penelope’s loyalty—the quality to endure. The quality of endurance ties Penelope’s loyalty with Odysseus’s homecoming. As Odysseus endures through all the hardships—the shipwreck near Charybdis and Scylla—and temptations by nymphs, Penelope must endure through the marriage proposals of the suitors and their persuasion for her to give up waiting for Odysseus. The article illustrates how the quality of endurance ties men and women together. The extensive nature of the article is on textually analyzing the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope, especially quotations that illustrate a slight fear on the part of Odysseus for Penelope. In perceiving the reoccurring theme of “female harmers” throughout Odysseus’s homecomings, such as the Sirens, Circe, and Calypso, Odysseus is weary and skeptic about seemingly helpful behaviors from females, believing that there is always an underlying wish to harm him. Odysseus’s fear for Penelope is really a continuum of his general fear of the other sex. The article also discusses Penelope’s potential of undermining what Odysseus tries to gain from his nostos—human kleos. Returning home enables Odysseus to regain his name and status at home, especially through narrating his own glorious achievements in battles and adventures. Odysseus will no longer be able to do so if Penelope remarries. In that case, Penelope would be like her foil Clytemnestra, bringing the ultimate “shame” to her husband. One of the most ingenious arguments made by this article is about the correlations between Odysseus’s and Telemachus’s nostoi. While the nostos of Telemachus is minor in the entire epic, it nevertheless carries on attributes of Odysseus’s major nostos, linking itself to the discussion of homecoming’s relationship with gender roles. The purpose of Telemachus’s homecoming is also tied to kleos. Being the son of our protagonist, Telemachus is often ridiculed and despised by the suitors as they belittled his father. By travelling to Nestor and Menelaus’s places, Telemachus tries to gain glory for his father by proving that his father is still alive. Telemachus’s glory when he returns home is thus heavily tied to Odysseus’s glory. Aiding Odysseus to restore his leadership position, Telemachus helps to prevent Penelope from shaming Odysseus through a marriage with one of the suitors. Overall, the article shows how Penelope’s character, gender role, and position to remarry make homecoming of Odysseus important and challenging for achieving kleos, juxtaposing it with the complementary homecoming of Telemachus.

10)This article focuses a lot on shaping Odysseus’s final homecoming through different rites. As defined by the article, the homecoming undergoes three rites— “rites of separation, rites of transition, and rites of incorporation”. By literary analysis through various signifying actions in Odysseus’s travel, such as “sleep” and “bath”, the article explores how these symbols manipulates Odysseus’s relationship with the company of friends. It is interesting to see the relationship between “purification” and “transition” in Odysseus’s nostos. By cleaning himself through “bathing” or a spiritual, generalized purification through a fire, Odysseus incorporates or reincorporates into a society. The article notably brings up Odysseus’s bath at Scheria before being accepted as a guest in the city. Most readers view Odysseus’s refusal to be bathed by “young maidens” to be a continuation of his fear and skepticism towards the female sex because of female harmers he encountered throughout his adventures. Naturally, this exhibition of fear towards nudity on the part of Odysseus, a man, is abnormal under social standards of ancient Greece, mirroring the overall gender anomaly in the Phaeacian royals. The article, however, considers this shyness on the part of Odysseus as his refusal to stay too long with the Phaeacians. The article juxtaposes Odysseus’s comparatively light bath at Scheria with the luxurious bath of Circe. Considering how the good xenia on the part of Circe leads to Odysseus’s detention on the island for an entire year, Odysseus’s refusal to be treated in overly lavish ways suggests his refusal of “too much xenia” on the Phaeacians’ part. Since bath symbolizes blending into the society besides a sign of xenia, Odysseus effectively refuses to be entirely blended in with the Phaeacians, as he wishes to return home quickly. Odysseus’s endurance over potentially exciting times spent in the beautiful island shows his resolution over coming home. The endurance mirrors Calypso’s question posed at the start of the Odyssey. Even though he can stay forever with a beautiful goddess, he still chooses to continue the path of nostos, as homecoming is the way for humans to gain kleos—coming home and have his glorious memories passed on through generations. Overall, the article correlates rituals around Odysseus with his nostos, expanding on how certain anomalies Odysseus exhibits through the rituals shows his yearning to return home.