M. I. Finley.
The World of Odysseus.
London: The Folio Society, 2002.

A recent paperback edition of The World of Odysseus has been published by The New York Review of Books in their NYRB Classics series.

The Iliad and Odyssey were composed in perhaps the eighth century B.C. Using insights from modern sociology and cultural anthropology, Finley constructs a portrait of Greek society of approximately the ninth and tenth centuries B.C., the period embodied in the oral traditions from which the poet(s) drew upon in composing the poems.