Katherine R De Boer (Xavier University)
This paper studies the intersection of hypertext and paratext in the cover art of adaptations of Homer’s Iliad: Dolan’s The War Nerd Iliad and Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. Both covers feature original artwork: by the surrealist C.M. Kösemen (Dolan), and the printmaker Sarah Young (Barker). Both artists draw on the visual styles of Greek vase painting but invest them with modern visual codes that complicate each author’s engagement with the gendered dynamics of Homer.
These two adaptations represent very different approaches to receiving the Iliad. Dolan’s brutal, bare-bones version often compresses women’s speeches and obscures their most poignant critiques of war-violence. Barker’s version, written largely from the perspective of Briseis, seeks to fill the gaps left by women’s silence in the Iliad (Barker 2021). Barker focuses on "the captive’s dilemma” (Scodel)—the enslaved concubine’s negotiation between past loyalties and present realities.
Kösemen’s cover art complements Dolan’s hypermasculine reading, but also subtly questions it. A solitary warrior is depicted in yellows and oranges against a black background—a color scheme reminiscent of red-figure vase painting. The figure is armed and anthropomorphic but also insectoid, with a toothy, protruding mandible. Its Kafkaesque quality suggests the metamorphosis of Dolan’s “Akilles” from “soft” and “sentimental” (34) into a blood-thirsty killing machine. Yet the breakdown of somatic boundaries in metamorphosis is culturally understood as a feminine quality, both in Greek thought (Carson) and today (Kristeva, Creed). Furthermore, the snaky tendrils encircling the figure recall the serpent-trimmed apparel characteristic of Athena in many vase paintings and further suggest the creature’s gender ambiguity. Ultimately, the image resists gendered classification: is it male or female, Achilles or Athena, both or neither?
Young’s cover for Barker’s adaptation also features a Homeric warrior. This stylized figure, rendered in black with gold details, evokes black-figure vase painting. Static, solitary, and largely monochromatic, the male figure contrasts with the four “girls” below: they are rendered in dynamic colors, and their animation is suggested by movement lines, flowing hair, and variations in pose. The masculine figure, however, is more prominent: it is foregrounded by its position alongside the title text and indeed intrudes into the visual space of the title, looming over both the word “girls” and the female figures below. The image, therefore, highlights the dominance of Achilles in the lives and stories of the novel’s victimized women. Briseis is displaced from the central position of the cover’s paratext much as she is displaced within the Iliad itself.
As “entryway paratexts” (Gray), cover illustrations precondition the reader’s experience of a text, yet cover design is seldom within the author’s purview (Genette). In both instances explored here, the visual semiotics of the cover art may be read in tension with the text itself in a complex web of “intersignification” (Roller). The dialogue between text and paratext offers a window into the dialogue between hypotext and hypertext that complicates both authors’ reconfigurings of epic gender norms.