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Epic and Empire

Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton
  • David Quint
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2021
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Literature in History
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About this book

Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated.


Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

Author / Editor information

David Quint is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature (Yale) and The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano (Massachusetts).


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PART ONE. EPIC AND THE WINNERS

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PART TWO. EPIC AND THE LOSERS

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PART THREE. TASSO AND MILTON

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PART FOUR. A MODERN EPILOGUE

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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 12, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9780691222950
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
444
Other:
1 fig.
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