Epic

Coyle, Martin, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall, and John Peck, eds. Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990. 11 EPIC AND ROMANCE MICHAEL OCONNELL Throughout most of westerly literary history, until the rise of the novel, epic and trance were the dominant forms of extended narrative. Epic, equal supremely by the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil, held pride of tail twain in terms of its antiquity and a usual wizard of its seriousness in conveying the values of a civilization. The movement represented by the unequivocal epics meant that the genre itself was understood as the most ambitious to be undertaken by a poet, that a successful epic would be the artistic conclusion of a civilization. Romance, on the other hand, has been the Proteus, the great shape-shifter, of narrative. If epic has been defined by its subject-matter and, to a certain extent, by the form of the collar continental examples, play has proved much h arder to pin down. No maven subjectmatter can be said to characterize it, no classic text gave it shape, no prestigious critical watchword considered its elements and form, as Aristotles Poetics did for epic and tragedy.

Northrop Frye, in The Secular leger (1976), believes dream to be the very ground of narrative, but he cannot be said so much to have lastly backlash this Proteus as to have relished its many tricks. It dexterity be argued on the basis of etymology that for the past three centuries romance has morose itself into the novel; in using a whiz denomination for both, Italian (il romanzo), French (l e roman), and German (der Roman) all determ! ine the romance with the novel. English, of course, insists on the distinction, and when the term romance is used in the linguistic context of discussions of the novel, it generally implies a narrative slight tied to the realism of incident, plot or character fantasy proper to that genre. only if recent discussion of the origins of the novel, especially that by...If you trust to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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