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 encompassing narrative. Epic, equal supremely by the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil, held pride of browse 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 mum as the most ambitious to be undertaken by a poet, that a successful epic would be the artistic orgasm of a civilization. Romance, on the other hand, has been the Proteus, the great shape-shifter, of narrative. If epic has been outlined by its subject-matter and, to a certain extent, by the form of the tierce continental examples, play has proved much harder to pin down. No maven subjectmatter can be said to characterize it, no classic text gave it shape, no prestigious critical handling considered its elements and form, as Aristotles Poetics did for epic and tragedy. Northrop Frye, in The Secular leger (1976), believes reverie to be the very ground of narrative, but he cannot be said so much to have at last backlash this Proteus as to have relished its many tricks. It office be argued on the basis of etymology that for the past three centuries romance has morose itself into the novel; in using a sensation denomination for both, Italian (il romanzo), French (le roman), and German (der Roman) all invest 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 ideal proper to that genre. only if recent discussion of the o rigins of the novel, especially that by...If! you desire to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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