This chapter explores the spatial dimensions of the trope of the epic return journey (the nostos) and focuses on the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces. Loney first highlights dislocation as an important feature in epic, and a motivating force behind its plot: the feeling of being separated in time or space from a more ideal past or home. Under this single conception of ‘dislocation’, the chapter brings together two poetic themes which scholars have traditionally treated discretely: nostalgia and homesickness. Archaic epics, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days, rely on a narrative of decline—of temporal dislocation—from an antecedent ‘golden age’, for which internal characters and external audiences are nostalgic. Similarly, characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey may be spatially dislocated and homesick, motivating a return journey (prototypically Odysseus, but also at moments Achilles and Helen).

Chapter 5 marks Naipaul’s serious turn to Africa. In his first significant book on Africa, In a Free State (1971), Naipaul does not write the formulaic postcolonial novel; what he does is explore colonial repression, the silent, menacing, underside of the spirit of Victorian expansionism. And he does this in the shadow of the master, Conrad. To Naipaul, Conrad’s Africa is such a powerful foundational discourse that it shapes his reading of Africa, and especially of the Congo. But it also provides the right intertext for his own great work on Africa, A Bend in the River. The chapter argues that in the hands of Naipaul postcolonial reconstruction, decolonization, and the restructuring of class relations have a narrative function where an aesthetic impulse is always present. In that transformation human relations, and their representation, become important. For Naipaul, any new history – postcolonial or revisionist – remains equally “opaque” if in the absence of an open-ended critique it transforms social history into the dangerous, imperialist, great man narrative of history, precisely the kind of great man history celebrated under imperialism.

Socrates provides here an eschatological account that is thoroughly integrated into a novel cosmology. I argue that the Phaedo’s cosmology draws on and reflects the account of forms and ordinary objects that Socrates presented over the course of the Phaedo. The result is a distinctly Platonic account of the cosmos and the afterlife, one that treats the best parts of the cosmos as form-like and the worst parts as the source of flux. How we live now determines whether after death we will live in a more form-like or flux-like area; this dwelling, in turn, determines whether our souls are benefited or harmed in the afterlife. Since Socrates does not suggest in the Phaedo that any god is responsible for the cosmos, I argue that he avoids needing to explain why our souls can be harmed in the afterlife. In the secondary literature, this section of the dialogue is universally called “the myth,” which has led to treating the entirety of his account as having the same epistemic status. I argue instead that the account has five distinct stages, only the fifth of which Socrates calls a “myth” (muthos).

This chapter comprises two parts. The first addresses the physical natural and social function of archaic and classical Greek roads. Of key importance is the fact that ancient Greek roads were not paved on the surface of the earth but were ruts inscribed into it; when a vehicle set out on such a road, it was thus locked into these ruts as a tramcar is locked onto its tracks. I gesture towards the bearing that this will have on Parmenides’ use of road imagery to develop and articulate a notion of what we would call logical necessity. The second half of this chapter examines the semantics of the word hodos. Notably, the word can signify both an object (especially the rut road just discussed) and an activity. This activity is teleological, a characteristic I explore in terms borrowed from discussions of linguistic aspect and the Kenny–Vendler typology of situations; I conclude that the activity signified by the word hodos is a kind of accomplishment in that it is both durative and telic. Exploiting the two meanings of hodos and harnessing the distinctive features of each, Parmenides imparts a distinctive shape to his ‘Route to Truth’ and endows it with specific qualities characteristic of what we would call an extended deductive argument and a demonstration

This chapter characterises visionary experiences of heaven, hell, and purgatory received by medieval religious women.The twelfth-century Benedictines Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schönau offer detailed representations of a celestial city but fewer specifics regarding the netherworld.Hildegard’s perception of the cosmos informs her view of heaven, whereas for Elisabeth it symbolises a longed-for end to life’s journey.Among the Cistercian women residing at Helfta in the thirteenth century, the graphic descriptions of otherworldly realms described by Mechthild of Magdeburg in The Flowing Light of the Godhead are most remarkable.For her contemporaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great, the joyous union with Christ on earth is emphasised equally with the union in heaven.The striking scenes depicting the judgement of sinners in purgatory found in the revelations of the fourteenth-century saint Birgitta of Sweden serve as an admonition to her more secular audience.