"The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. In this fresh, authoritative version--the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman--this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse...

The moral stories of Rabelais (c.1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones, and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its...

Presents seventeenth-century British poet John Milton's classic epic poems "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," along with a scholarly introduction, a Milton chronology, and a selected bibliography. These controversial epic poems demonstrate Milton's genius for fusing sense and sound, classicism and innovation, narrative and drama in profound explorations of the moral problems of God's justice-and what it truly means to be human.