Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems by Thomas R. Walsh Available Online via CHS

New Online Publication at CHS
The Center for Hellenic Studies is pleased to announce that Thomas R. Walsh’s Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems (2005) is now available as part of the CHS Online Publications collection.
Anger is central to the Homeric epic, but few scholarly interventions have probed Homer’s language beyond the study of the Iliad’s first word: menis. Yet Homer uses over a dozen words for anger. Fighting Words and Feuding Words engages the powerful tools of Homeric poetic analysis and the anthropological study of emotion in an analysis of two anger terms highlighted in the Iliad by the Achaean prophet Calchas. Walsh argues that kotos and kholos locate two focal points for the study of aggression in Homeric poetry, the first presenting Homer’s terms for feud and the second providing the native terms that designates the martial violence highlighted by the Homeric tradition. After focusing on these two terms as used in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Walsh concludes by addressing some post-Homeric and comparative implications of Homeric anger.
Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems is available in print via Lexington Books.

Thomas R. Walsh is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College.

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