Every great civilisation from the Bronze Age to the present day has produced epic poems. Epic poetry has always had a profound influence on other literary genres, including its own parody in the form of mock-epic. This 'Companion' surveys over four thousand years of epic poetry from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott's postcolonial 'Omeros'. The list of epic poets analysed here includes some of the greatest writers in literary history in Europe and beyond: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Camões, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and Pound, among others. Each essay, by an expert in the field, pays close attention to the way these writers have intimately influenced one another to form a distinctive and cross-cultural literary tradition. Unique in its coverage of the vast scope of that tradition, this book is an essential companion for students of literature of all kinds and in all ages.
Author(s): Catherine Bates (ed.)
Series: Cambridge Companions to Literature
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 298
Cover
Contents
List of Contributors
Preface
Chronology
1. A. R. George. The Epic of Gilgamesh
2. Jasper Griffin. Greek epic
3. Peter Toohey. Roman epic
4. Karl Reichl. Heroic epic poetry inthe Middle Ages
5. John Freccero. Dante and the epic of transcendence
6. Giuseppe Mazzotta. Italian Renaissance epic
7. George Monteiro. Camões's "Os Lusíadas": the first modern epic
8. Catherine Bates. "The Faerie Queene": Britain's national monument
9. David Loewenstein. The seventeenth-century Protestant English epic
10. Claude Rawson. Mock-heroic and English poetry
11. Michael O'Neill. Romantic re-appropriations of the epic
12. John Whittier-Ferguson. Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the modern epic
13. Robert Hamner. Derek Walcott's "Omeros"
14. Paul Merchant. Epic in translation
Guide to further reading
Index
