Piero Boitani's study is a perceptive and imaginative exploration of the myth of Ulysses in a range of Western literature from Homer to Joyce. Describing the many incarnations of Ulysses, Boitani sees the hero as an ideal observation-point from which to measure the similarities and differences between the otherness ("alterity") of the past and the "modernity" of the present. The relationships between poetry, history, and myth, and between rhetoric and the imaginary, are discussed, as is the figure of Ulysses in Homer, Dante, Tasso, Tennyson, Poe, Joyce, and Borges, to name but a few.