This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad explains why people care about this foundational epic poem and its characters. It represents the first book-length application to the Iliad of research in communications, literary studies, media studies, and psychology on how readers of a story or viewers of a play, movie, or television show find themselves immersed in the tale and identify with the characters. Immersed recipients get wrapped up in a narrative and the world it depicts and lose track to some degree of their real-world surroundings. Identification occurs when recipients interpret the storyworld from a character's perspective, feel emotions congruent with those of the character, and root for the character to succeed. This volume situates modern research on these experiences in relation to ancient criticism on how audiences react to narratives. It then offers close readings of select episodes and detailed analyses of recurring features to show how the Iliad immerses both ancient and modern recipients and encourages them to identify with its characters. Accessible to students and researchers, to those inside and outside of classical studies, this interdisciplinary project aligns research on the Iliad with contemporary approaches to storyworlds in a range of media. It thereby opens new frontiers in the study of ancient Greek literature and helps investigators of audience engagement from antiquity to the present contextualize and historicize their own work.

About the Author
Jonathan L. Ready is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at the University of Miami and at Indiana University. He is co-editor of Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters (University of Texas Press 2018), and he co-edits the annual Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (Brill).

Reviews
This book is a must-read-not just for classicists but for anyone who wants a master class in recent theories of identification and immersion. * Rita Felski, John Stewart Bryan Professor University of Virginia *
Warmly recommended for its exciting-and productive-new insights into the reader's experience of a storyworld: this is an important contribution to literary studies, ancient and modern. * Elizabeth Minchin, FAHA, Emeritus Professor of Classics, The Australian National University *
Ready offers an extremely nuanced and detailed examination of how identification and immersion work, drawing on the latest research from across narrative studies... By pointing out the criteria for (or features that facilitate) identification and immersion in a range of Iliadic passages, Ready shows not only that the Iliad is immersive but also how the poem encourages such strong engagement. * Lilah Grace Canevaro, Greece and Rome *
Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192870971
Author Prof Jonathan L. Ready
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 614g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 160mm * 20mm