"A Literary History of the Trojan War from Antiquity to the Middle Ages" analyzes the various renditions of the mythical and historical accounts of the Trojan War from Homer to Shakespeare. It contains a discussion of the stylistic, literary and generic changes these stories underwent as authors over time and across Europe translated and adapted their sources to make them relevant to contemporary audiences. The work also examines two important political and historical themes: the use of a Trojan genealogy to justify claims of political legitimacy and the use of Troy to critique and comment on the author's age. Both are present in The Iliad and The Odyssey; they also play an important role in Pindar's odes, wherein athletic competition is often compared to martial combat, and in Attic tragedy, wherein the sack of Troy serves as a cautionary exemplum for Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

These two themes are then examined in Virgil and Ovid's poetic retellings of the Trojan War. Although scholars disagree whether their works glorify the Roman Empire and whether their heroes, particularly Aeneas, be positive exempla, it is agreed that such questions are central to any understanding of them. The next significant rendition analyzed are the first extended prose accounts by the late antiquity chroniclers Dares and Dictys; drawing on the historiographical tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, these authors excised the role of the gods and presented the war in rational, not supernatural, terms.

The second part of the dissertation focuses on the transmission of Trojan War stories in the Middle Ages, when rulers sought to legitimize their power the same way as the Romans: by claiming descent from Trojans. Modeled after The Aeneid but using the literary conventions of Dares's and Dictys's chronicles, medieval authors such as Snorri Sturlusson and Geoffrey of Monmouth invented genealogies for their royal patrons which traced their ancestry back to Trojan exiles and characterized their heroes according to the ideals of their own societies. The final two chapters discuss Trojan romances and Trojan tragedies, analyzing these two genres for the paradigmatic significance of the War itself and the individuals fighting in it.