Epic and Empire

Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton

By: David Quint

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Paperback | 26 April 1993

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448 Pages

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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 Lusiadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigne'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.

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Non-Fiction Literature, Poetry & Plays History & Criticism of Literature Literary Studies of Poetry & Poets History Earliest Times to Present Day Ancient History to the Year 500 General Literary Studies Classical Literary Studies

Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 3
Epic and the Winners	p. 19
Epic and Empire: Versions of Actium	p. 21
Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid	p. 50
Epic and the Losers	p. 97
The Epic Curse and Camoes' Adamastor	p. 99
Epics of the Defeated: The Other Tradition of Lucan, Ercilla, and d'Aubigne	p. 131
Tasso and Milton	p. 211
Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata	p. 213
Tasso, Milton, and the Boat of Romance	p. 248
Paradise Lost and the Fall of the English Commonwealth	p. 268
David's Census: Milton's Politics and Paradise Regained	p. 325
A Modern Epilogue	p. 341
Ossian, Medieval "Epic," and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky	p. 343
Notes to the Chapters	p. 369
Index	p. 427
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Epic and Empire

Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton

At a Glance

Paperback

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