W.B. STANFORD

W. B. STANFORD (1910–1984)

William Bedell Stanford was an Irish classical scholar and senator who lived through the transition of the south of Ireland from the United Kingdom to the Republic. As a senator he epitomized the change of outlook of those whose background had been Southern Unionist. A member of the Board of Trinity College, he often took an independent view, and was a participant in the integration of the College into the new Ireland. Stanford established himself as a Greek scholar in his twenties with the publication of two books that approached Greek literature as a subject for literary criticism, Greek Metaphor: Studies in Theory and Practice and Ambiguity in Greek Literature.

THE ULYSSES THEME
A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero

Fourth, revised and emended edition 2022

Paperback original, 454 pages, $28
ISBN: 978-0-88214-961-5

Kindle/Apple Books, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-963-9

Oedipus still dominates the psychoanalytic imagination, though Ulysses is a more central to Western tradition, from Virgil, Dictys, and Dante, the medieval and Renaissance Troy tales of Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Joachim du Bellay to the twentieth-century literary adaptations by James Joyce and Nikos Kazantzakis. Stanford’s delightfully readable and erudite, survey of the Ulysses figure revolutionizes conventional accounts of this hero. For here is a Ulysses with closer ties to wife, mother, nymphs, and goddesses than his fellow warriors, a faithful husband who dallies with seductive enchantresses, a man of valor who wins by deceit—the Trojan Horse. In his brilliantly challenging foreword, “The Classicist and the Psychopath,” Charles Boer brings the hero’s wanderings up to the twenty-first century by examining the strange fascination of academics with Ulysses and exposing the peculiar prejudices that are hidden in Classical scholarship.

Image of Chapter 1 with red-figure pyxis

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If you only read one book in your life on Ulysses, be sure it’s Stanford’s!
—JAMES HILLMAN