Chronicling the last year of the Trojan War, Homer's Iliad was the first great war poem. As the first of the major epics, it stands as the prototype for all successors. More than a war poem, the Iliad also offers plenty of information about the ancient Greek social structure. The title, Homer’s The Iliad, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Homer’s The Iliad through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Homer, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.
