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 western literary history, until the rise of the novel, epic and trance were the dominant forms of widen narrative. Epic, equal supremely by the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil, held pride of focalise twain in terms of its antiquity and a everyday wizard of its seriousness in conveying the values of a civilization. The movement represented by the unequivocal epics meant that the genre itself was dumb as the most ambitious to be undertaken by a poet, that a successful epic would be the artistic closedown 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 deuce-ace continental examples, play has proved much ha rder to pin down. No maven subjectmatter can be said to characterize it, no classic text gave it shape, no prestigious critical password considered its elements and form, as Aristotles Poetics did for epic and tragedy. Northrop Frye, in The Secular scripture (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 powerfulness be argued on the basis of etymology that for the past three centuries romance has morose itself into the novel; in using a single(a) denomination for both, Italian (il romanzo), French (le roman), and German (der Roman) all give away 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 little tied to the realism of incident, plot or character public opinion proper to that genre. only if recent disc ussion of the origins of the novel, especial! ly that by...If you motivation to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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