Mythology (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)

I was surprised there was a SparkNotes volume for Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," because as this little blue book itself notes at one point, her book is like "one large SparkNote in itself." However, since Hamilton's classic look at the "Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes" is a staple of my Classical Greek and Roman Mythology course I picked this up to make sure I know what my students may pick up from this study guide.After an overview there is a Character List that covers the gods, heroes and monsters, broken down in over a half-dozen categories. This would certainly help students learn who is who, but they still need to remember that the point of reading this book is to learn about the stories and not just who was the god of war, etc. The Analysis of Major Characters only looks at Zeus, Odysseus, Oedipus and Medea, and only provides two paragraphs on each. For me, the strongest section of this book is the one establishing Themes, Motifs & Symbols, which looks at: The Dominance of Fate, Bloodshed Begets Bloodshed, The Danger of Arrogance and Hubris, Reward for Goodness and Retribution for Evil, The Hero's Quest, Beauty, Love, Cannibalism, and Art. Again, these are brief sections (two paragraphs each except for Fate, which gets three), which means that they give students an idea of each of these ideas without providing anything substantial that might, by accident no doubt, make its way into a student's paper. Actually, this is an important consideration. As long as the writing assignments for your class are relatively substantial, the study guides are going to provide help but your students are still going to have to make the case. The biggest section of this volume provides a Summary and Analysis of "Mythology" broken down by chapters and parts. The summaries, as a general rule, do for Hamilton what she has done for Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, and the rest of the Greek writers. The analyses are of more value, but I would contend that unless you have read Hamilton (or the original works) then it is difficult to really appreciate the analyses off of having read just the summaries. Again, the analyses point students in the right direction, but do not do the work for them. The Important Quotations Explained section, apparently standard in SparkNotes, is unusual since it looks at a couple of lines from Greek tragedies, the riddle of the Sphinx, and Hamilton's comments on Roman mythology. So far I have been reasonably impressed with the SparkNotes volumes I have seen. Clearly these study guides, put together by Harvard students, have been created to do something different from CliffNotes. The biggest difference to me is that the analysis is more streamlined, which may simply result from the fact that the little blue books are written by students and the little yellow books are written by professors.