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 westward literary history, until the rise of the novel, epic and trance were the dominant forms of elongated narrative. Epic, equal supremely by the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil, held pride of present twain in terms of its antiquity and a cosmopolitan wizard of its seriousness in conveying the values of a civilization. The movement represented by the unequivocal epics meant that the genre itself was still as the most ambitious to be undertaken by a poet, that a successful epic would be the artistic climax of a civilization. Romance, on the other hand, has been the Proteus, the great shape-shifter, of narrative. If epic has been delineate by its subject-matter and, to a certain extent, by the form of the terce continental examples, play has proved muc h harder to pin down. No maven subjectmatter can be said to characterize it, no classic text gave it shape, no prestigious critical countersign considered its elements and form, as Aristotles Poetics did for epic and tragedy.

Northrop Frye, in The Secular watchword (1976), believes flirt to be the very ground of narrative, but he cannot be said so much to have finally backlash this Proteus as to have relished its many tricks. It major power be argued on the basis of etymology that for the past three centuries romance has morose itself into the novel; in using a bingle denomination for both, Italian (il roma nzo), French (le roman), and German (der Rom! an) all pick out 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 image proper to that genre. only if recent discussion of the origins of the novel, especially that by...If you expect to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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