Chapter 1 offers a clear narrative map of the Trojan War tradition and the two Homeric poems. It outlines the start of the war, the plot and emotional core of the Iliad, the fall of Troy, and the structure of the Odyssey. It then highlights Odysseus as the figure who connects the poems, linking battlefield experience to the long, uncertain return.

Chapter 9 examines how the Odyssey has been continuously reimagined across nearly three millennia, from Dante to contemporary film and literature. It explores how each generation has found in Odysseus’ journey a framework for understanding war trauma, exile, diaspora, and displacement, demonstrating that the epic endures not as a fixed text but as a living narrative that speaks to experiences of loss, return, and the ongoing struggle to rebuild meaning after catastrophe.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s encounters with the works of Caribbean intellectuals – C.L.R. James, George Lamming and Frantz Fanon – helped him crystallize global blackness around the nexus between race and geography vis à vis politics of domination and resistance. Emerging from Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean life and thought were his pronouncements on the mismatch between aspiration and deprivation of the postcolonial, post-plantation/post-slavery Caribbean inhabitants. Their experiences, variously and collectively, signalled to Ngugi the importance of language as a cultural currency with which the formerly enslaved and/or colonised people could assert their being in and of the world, and negotiate their place in discursive praxes that had for long defaulted to European languages as the most appropriate vehicles of expression. These processes played out against the backdrop of painful histories, which had raptured the Caribbean islanders’ and some Africans’ attachment to cultures, economics and geographies, due to slavery and colonial violence. Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean history and culture through the creative and critical works of James, Lamming and Fanon rendered the Caribbean a nucleus that Ngugi germinated and nurtured to expound on his earlier thoughts in subsequent collections of essays and memoirs that amplified his concerns with ‘decolonising the mind’ and ‘moving the centre’.

Itineraries of poetry across language boundaries do not necessarily entail actual travel on the poet’s part. However, writers ancient and modern did go on excursions to the lands associated with the poetic traditions with which they interacted – as did readers too. Chapter 5 resumes discussion of two poets who appeared in Chapter 4, Joachim Du Bellay in sixteenth-century France (via the French Antiquitez de Rome, the Latin Elegiae, and other works) and John Milton in seventeenth-century England (via the bilingual double book of 1645, its Latin half framed by dedicatory testimonia from learned Italians and by the career-punctuating Epitaph for Damon). For both, language choice would have been an issue even without their ventures abroad; but both use their time in Italy to explore, sharpen, thematize, and problematize transcultural issues of language and identity. Is the passage to Italy a celebration of linguistic cosmopolitanism or a test of linguistic loyalty, a journey home or a journey into exile and alienation? What kinds of language question do poetic travellers to Italy negotiate, and what Rome, or whose Rome, do they find?

Liverpool’s FA Cup final win over Leeds United is the jumping off point here for a chapter on LFC, the Beatles, and Liverpool’s social history in a period when the city was, in the words of poet Allen Ginsberg, ‘the centre of consciousness of the human universe’. Ginsberg was on Merseyside in May 1965, the month in which Liverpool beat Leeds to win the club’s first FA Cup. The ensuing celebrations, as one local newspaper remarked, made The Beatles’ recent homecoming ‘look like a vicarage tea party’. Central to this chapter is the interlinked role of football and music as mass cultural forces behind Liverpool’s resurgent civic pride in the 1960s.

The simile world of Homer’s Odyssey is teeming with human connections, and family relationships play a central role. This distinctive aspect of the simile world of the Odyssey helps to tell the poem’s tale of human relationships, the burden of sorrow when they are disrupted, and the heroic task of keeping relationships alive through danger, separation, and loss. The Odyssey is not just about Odysseus’ homecoming but also homecoming itself. How do we know when we are truly “home”? What if we reach our home, but we cannot return there? What are the costs of a long absence, both for the person who returns and for those who remain at home? In what way can homecoming be considered a form of heroism? What complex mixture of feelings accompanies a long-awaited return home? The intertwined gladness and sorrow that defines the Odyssey’s tale of homecoming arises from the characters and incidents of the simile world at least as much as from the story of Odysseus and from the process of integrating the two more than from either sort of narrative individually.

Taken as a whole the story told in this book is one of disembodiment, a loss of body. As such it corresponds to other stories of alienation told by sociologists. Yet restoring what has been lost is fraught with dangers. We cannot readily go back, and attempts to do so have had disastrous consequences. It is not enough to simply add physical exercises to our daily routine. Instead, we need once again to take movements seriously as intentional acts.

A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881) represented major reorientations of Ibsen’s dramatic authorship, initiating a turn to middle-class life treated with tragic seriousness and radicalism. These plays made Ibsen the spearhead of the Scandinavian ‘Modern Breakthrough’, reaffirming his literary superiority, while at the same time bringing new levels of commercial success. The reorientation was made possible by the literary dynamics unfolding in Scandinavia at the time. By the early 1880s, Ibsen gave up on his ambition to get a foothold in Germany, moved back to Italy (1880–5) and once more prioritized his home markets. His association with the Literary Left was not a lasting one, however. With An Enemy of the People (1882) and The Wild Duck (1884), he distanced himself from social criticism and gradually established a position all his own. Moving back again to Munich (1885–91), he eventually experienced a breakthrough also in German literature and theatre from 1887, followed by Britain from 1889. After Ibsen again settled in Norway in 1891, he wrote for a European market, concluded his production with a series of self-reflective plays, and tried to frame his oeuvre as a continuously unfolding and self-sufficient whole.

Despite Homeric emphasis on male heroism, women and female divinities play central roles in both poems.

Nostoi refers to a Cyclic epic or poem by Stesichorus describing the aftermath of the Trojan War, linking it to legendary migrations and historical colonizations.