Modern Odysseys

<div>Michelle Zerba's <i>Modern Odysseys</i> explores three major writers in global modernism from the Mediterranean Anglo-European Britain and the Caribbean whose groundbreaking literary works have never been studied together before. Using language as an instrument of revolution and social change C. P. Cavafy Virginia Woolf and Aimé Césaire gave expression to the forms of human experience we now associate with modernity: homoeroticism transsexuality and racial consciousness. More specifically Zerba argues that Odyssean tropes of diffusion isolation passage and return give form to works by these writers but in ways that invite us to reconsider and revise the basic premises of reception studies and intellectual history.   Combining close readings of literary texts with the study of interviews essays diaries and letters Zerba advances a revisionary account of how to approach relationships between antiquity and modernity. Instead of frontal encounters with the <i>Odyssey</i> Cavafy Woolf and Césaire indirectly-but no less significantly-engage with Homer's epic poem. In demonstrating how such encounters operate <i>Modern Odysseys</i> explores issues of race and sexuality that connect antiquity with the modern period.  </div>