Epic

Author: Paul Innes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136158529
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
This student guidebook offers a clear introduction to an often complex and unwieldy area of literary studies. Tracing epic from its ancient and classical roots through postmodern and contemporary examples this volume discusses: a wide range of writers including Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Cervantes, Keats, Byron, Eliot, Walcott and Tolkien texts from poems, novels, children’s literature, tv, theatre and film themes and motifs such as romance, tragedy, religion, journeys and the supernatural. Offering new directions for the future and addressing the place of epic in both English-language texts and World Literature, this handy book takes you on a fascinating guided tour through the epic.

The Epic Trickster in American Literature

Author: Gregory E. Rutledge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136194835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
Just as Africa and the West have traditionally fit into binaries of Darkness/Enlightenment, Savage/Modern, Ugly/Beautiful, and Ritual/Art, among others, much of Western cultural production rests upon the archetypal binary of Trickster/Epic, with trickster aesthetics and commensurate cultural forms characterizing Africa. Challenging this binary and the exceptionalism that underlies anti-hegemonic efforts even today, this book begins with the scholarly foundations that mapped out African trickster continuities in the United States and excavated the aesthetics of traditional African epic performances. Rutledge locates trickster-like capacities within the epic hero archetype (the "epic trickster" paradigm) and constructs an Homeric Diaspora, which is to say that the modern Homeric performance foundation lies at an absolute time and distance away from the ancient storytelling performance needed to understand the cautionary aesthetic inseparable from epic potential. As traditional epic performances demonstrate, unchecked epic trickster dynamism anticipates not only brutal imperialism and creative diversity, but the greatest threat to everyone, an eco-apocalypse. Relying upon the preeminent scholarship on African-American trickster-heroes, traditional African heroic performances, and cultural studies approaches to Greco-Roman epics, Rutledge traces the epic trickster aesthetic through three seminal African-American novels keenly attuned to the American Homeric Diaspora: Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Early Yiddish Epic

Author: Jerold C. Frakes
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815652682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521

Book Description
Unlike most other ancient European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean civilizations, Jewish culture surprisingly developed no early epic tradition: while the Bible comprises a broad range of literary genres, epic is not among them. Not until the late medieval period, Beginning in the fourteenth century, did an extensive and thriving epic tradition emerge in Yiddish. Among the few dozen extant early epics, there are several masterpieces, of which ten are translated into English in this volume. Divided between the religious and the secular, the book includes eight epics presented in their entirety, an illustrative excerpt from another epic, and a brief heroic prose tale.These texts have been chosen as the best and the most interesting representatives of the genre in terms of cultural history and literary quality: the pious “epicizing” of biblical narrative, the swashbuckling medieval courtly epic, Arthurian romance, heroic vignettes, intellectual high art, and popular camp.

Women and War in Roman Epic

Author: Elina Pyy
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004443452
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
In Women and War in Roman Epic, Elina Pyy discusses the narrative and ideological functions of gender in the works of Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus. By examining the themes of violence, death, guilt, grief, and anger in their epics, she offers an account of the intertextual tradition of the genre and its socio-political background. Through a combination of classical narratology and Julia Kristeva’s subjectivity theory, Pyy scrutinises how gendered marginality is constructed in the genre and how it contributes to the fashioning of Roman imperial identity. Focusing on the ambiguous elements of epic, the study looks beyond the binary oppositions between the Self and the Other, male and female, and Roman and barbarian.

Epic of the Dispossessed

Author: Robert D. Hamner
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211521
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
Hamner describes Omeros as an epic of the dispossessed because each of its protagonists is a castaway in one sense or another. Regardless of whether their ancestry is traced to the classical Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, or confined to the Americas, they are transplanted individuals whose separate quests all center on the fundamental human need to strike roots in a place where one belongs.

god, man, and epic poetry

Author: H. V. Routh
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description

Inconsistency in Roman Epic

Author: James J. O'Hara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113946132X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Book Description
How should we react as readers and as critics when two passages in a literary work contradict one another? Classicists once assumed that all inconsistencies in ancient texts needed to be amended, explained away, or lamented. Building on recent work on both Greek and Roman authors, this book explores the possibility of interpreting inconsistencies in Roman epic. After a chapter surveying Greek background material including Homer, tragedy, Plato and the Alexandrians, five chapters argue that comparative study of the literary use of inconsistencies can shed light on major problems in Catullus' Peleus and Thetis, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Lucan's Bellum Civile. Not all inconsistencies can or should be interpreted thematically, but numerous details in these poems, and some ancient and modern theorists, suggest that we can be better readers if we consider how inconsistencies may be functioning in Greek and Roman texts.

Theologies of Fear in Early Greek Epic

Author: Carman Romano
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040131697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
This book explores the theological significance of horror elements in the works of Hesiod and in the Homeric Hymns for the characters within these poems, the mortal audience consuming them, and the poet responsible for mythopoesis. Theologies of Fear in Early Greek Epic argues that just as modern supernatural horror fiction can be analyzed to reveal popular conceptions of the divine, so too can the horrific elements in early Greek epic. Romano develops this analogy to show how myth-makers chose to include, omit, or nuance horror elements from their narratives in order to communicate theological messages. By employing methodological approaches from religious studies, classical studies, and literary studies of supernatural horror fiction, this book brings a fresh perspective to our understanding of how the Greeks viewed their gods and how poets helped to create that view. Theologies of Fear in Early Greek Epic will be of interest to scholars in classical studies, religious studies, and comparative literature, as well as students in courses on myth, religion, and Greek culture and society.

Homer and the Epic

Author: Andrew Lang
Publisher: London ; New York : Longmans, Green
ISBN:
Category : Calypso (Greek mythology) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description

The Narreme in the Medieval Romance Epic

Author: Eugene Dorfman
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442638354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
In this study Professor Dorfman applies the methods of modern linguistics to literary analysis. Literature may be described as the structured use of language: the modern linguistic analyzes language in a search for the minimal units of sound and form, phoneme and morpheme, and determines the combinations by which they can communicate meaning. The author here searches for a minimal structural unit in the literary narrative analogous to the phoneme and the morpheme in language structure. Based on a detailed analysis of the Roland and the Cid and twelve additional Romance narratives, Professor Dorfman's argument is that the structure of the medieval Romance epics may be analyzed into functional units which he calls "narremes." He divides a narrative into two types of structure: the superstructure and the substructure. A narrative, by definition, is a series of incidents. All the incidents in the narrative, taken as written, form the superstructure. Analysis, however, shows that many of the incidents may be abstracted from the narrative without deflecting the story-line. On the other hand, other incidents reveal themselves as organically linked with each other, so they cannot be omitted, without destroying the story-line. These selected incidents are the narremes, which make up the substructure of the narrative. This method of analysis produces so interesting and surprising results, results which make an important advance in research in linguistics and Romance literature. Eugene Dorfman, as an orthodox structuralist, has focused strictly on the formal descriptions of the narratives; but his analysis leads into the great traditional problems of literary history, and in particular poses anew the problem of the origins of the epic.