Sixty years ago, W.B. Stanford's The Ulysses Theme: Studies in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero concluded its study of the twists and turns of Odysseus in literary history by arguing that twentieth-century writers James Joyce and Nikos Kazantzakis had restored the complexity of Odysseus after centuries of adaptation had produced a series of flat types. In recent years, several critics have expanded Stanford's argument to explain the special importance of Homer in the twentieth-century imagination. One especially fruitful line of inquiry has considered the ways modern and contemporary receptions of the classics have challenged the hegemonic, Eurocentric frameworks of the Western literary tradition. Edited by B. Graziosi and E. Greenwood, Homer in the Twentieth Century. Between World Literature and the Western Canon foregrounds the central role Homer has played in the opening of the Western canon. Responding to the work of M. Bernal in Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, P. Rankine's Ulysses in Black. Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature focuses on Ellison's Homeric work to argue against a Eurocentric classical model, whereas E. Greenwood's Afro-Greeks. Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century shows the creative ways that the classics were moulded into an anti-imperial language by Caribbean writers in the twentieth century.

McC.'s formidable, lively new study emerges in dialogue with this rich history, synthesising the important discoveries of its predecessors while charting new directions for inquiries into postcolonial responses to classical literature. Its range is capacious and brings under a single cover works by Aimé Césaire, Ralph Ellison, Derek Walcott, Jon Amiel, Wilson Harris and Njabulo Ndebele, writers who, working in different media, genres and national traditions, all adapted and responded to Homer's Odyssey from a postcolonial or anticolonial perspective. As McC. is careful to emphasise in her introduction, her study does not argue for a single postcolonial response to the Odyssey. Rather, she draws skilfully on various theories of postcolonial literature, and emphasises the differences and discontinuities that characterise the postcolonial and anticolonial works at the heart of the volume. At every turn, McC. moves deftly from historical and sociopolitical contexts back to the ancient and modern literary texts. This approach yields an extraordinarily sensitive, nuanced picture of the multiple roles Homer played in the works to emerge in the African diaspora since 1939.

As a landmark anticolonialist poem in the francophone négritude movement, Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal launches the narrative of the volume. The first chapter explores Césaire's indirect appropriation of the Odyssey, one that evokes the Homeric epic without citing it or openly alluding to it. Drawing attention to the complexity of Césaire's use of Homer, McC. shows the ways in which the Odyssey served as a ‘template underlying his autobiographical protest poem in 1939, even before the postcolonial movement and literature became postcolonial as such’ (p. 41). She carefully situates Césaire's poem in the intellectual and political currents of the emerging, contested négritude movement. Just as the Odyssey served as a template for Cahier, Cahier went on to inspire and shape later postcolonial responses to the Odyssey, particularly Derek Walcott's work. In one of the study's most sensitive readings, McC. considers the significance of the fact that Cahier marked an important shift in adaptations of the Cyclops story by inverting the traditional roles of Odysseus as the victim and Polyphemus as the aggressor. In it, an impoverished man becomes a Cyclops figure besieged not by a human figure of Odysseus but rather, as McC. argues, by ‘manmade poverty itself, the result of the oppression to which the white colonialists have submitted their subjects’ (p. 48).

Ellison, Harris and Walcott expanded on Césaire's creative inversion of the Homeric narrative, with Ellison using the Cyclops figure to construct a complex thematics of blindness and seeing in post-war American racism, Harris adapting the Cyclops as both a victim and oppressor and Walcott using the Cyclops to explore modern totalitarianism. The Cyclops figure constitutes an essential thread running through the volume, as Homer's Cyclops story easily serves a range of different postcolonial readings. As the introduction explains (building on the work of, among others, C. Dougherty), the Odyssey is especially amenable to modern postcolonial and anticolonial projects because its narrative can easily be read as depicting a colonial enterprise, with Odysseus and his crew serving as prototypical colonial travellers. Although the structure of the volume brings to the foreground the development of postcolonial and anticolonial responses from 1939 to the twenty-first century, its organisation by author regrettably does not allow the brilliant separate discussions of the Cyclops to come as fully into dialogue as they otherwise might have. This drawback is outweighed by the rewards of the book's chosen structure, which allows each individual work to emerge against its own rich literary and political backdrop.

The difference in approaches taken in the Césaire and Ellison chapters makes evident the success of the methodological flexibility underlying the book. Whereas the first chapter meticulously excavates a subtle, but uncited textual appropriation of Homer, the second takes as its starting point Ellison's adaptation of the Odyssey to examine the ways that differences between the ancient and modern texts can be as illuminating as are points of resonance. In her fascinating intertextual readings, McC. helps bring to life the process by which the Odyssey served as both an important interlocutor and counterpoint for Ellison's project of articulating the complexities of situating a heroic narrative in an environment that refuses to acknowledge or see its hero.

McC.'s approach finds perhaps its fullest fruition in what is arguably the strongest chapter of the volume, its study of Walcott's Omeros and The Odyssey: a Stage Version. She reads the tensions of Walcott's responses to Homer as part of his articulation of the hybridity of Caribbean identity, which depends upon African, European and Caribbean sources. Walcott conceives of literary history in terms of a principle of simultaneity that allows us to see Homer, Joyce and Walcott as contemporaries. This model allows Walcott to transcend outmoded notions of literary origins and influence that would designate the Caribbean artist's work as imitative or derivative. McC.'s readings show that Walcott provides a simultaneously imaginative and critical framework for envisioning a multi-directional, transhistorical model of reception that has been significant not only to postcolonial literature but also modern literature more generally. The principle of simultaneity also animates Wilson Harris' aesthetic in The Mask of the Beggar, which McC. reads in dialogue with Walcott in her fifth chapter (which follows a chapter exploring the use of Odyssean figures in Jon Amiel's Somersby).

Rounding out McC.'s study are two chapters that expand the project's scope: a reading of Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela and a coda that contains McC.'s interview with Jatinder Verma, an artist born of Indian parents in East Africa who set up the first Asian theatre company in the UK in the 1970s. The chapter on The Cry of Winnie Mandela opens a discussion of the unique position of women in postcolonial responses to Homer. McC.'s work begins to explore this dimension of the subject but leaves open for further exploration why women have ‘remained in the shadows’ in such discussions (p. 211). The coda, McC. notes, ‘celebrates the ever more global reach of these works’ and begins to gesture towards the new horizons her project envisions (p. 16).

McC.'s often brilliant readings of both familiar and newer works build on the works of her predecessors and add an indispensable, significant contribution to our understanding of the complex, essential role played by Homer's Odyssey in twentieth-century literature. Her work will be valuable not only to classical receptions scholars but also to scholars with a wide range of interests in postcolonial literature and twentieth-century literature more generally.