Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Whatever Happened to the Epic? : [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]
- Chapter Two Leaving Paradise: [The final books of Paradise Lost and the end of an epic tradition]
- Chapter Three An Epic Told in Letters: [The migration of epic to the novel in Richardson’s Clarissa]
- Chapter Four Prospects and Living Pictures: [Epic history-writing in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
- Chapter Five Analyzing a Soul: [Wordsworth’s Prelude and Autobiographical Epic]
- Chapter Six Epic Heroinism: [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner’s Ring]
- Chapter Seven Cinematic Spectacle and the Hero: [The epic in film: Hollywood in the 1960s, and Abel Gance’s silent Napoléon]
- Chapter Eight Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey: [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings]
- Chapter Nine Imaginary History and Epic Fantasy: [Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion]
- Chapter Ten The Epic in Future Tense: [Frederick Turner’s three epic poems: The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse]
- Chapter Eleven Heaven and Hell Reimagined: [Tony Kushner’s Angels in America]
- Chapter Twelve Translating and Recentering Old Epics: [Contemporary translations of ancient epics and fictional adaptations by Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Madeline Miller, Maria Dahvana Headley]
- Index
Chapter One - Whatever Happened to the Epic? : [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Whatever Happened to the Epic? : [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]
- Chapter Two Leaving Paradise: [The final books of Paradise Lost and the end of an epic tradition]
- Chapter Three An Epic Told in Letters: [The migration of epic to the novel in Richardson’s Clarissa]
- Chapter Four Prospects and Living Pictures: [Epic history-writing in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
- Chapter Five Analyzing a Soul: [Wordsworth’s Prelude and Autobiographical Epic]
- Chapter Six Epic Heroinism: [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner’s Ring]
- Chapter Seven Cinematic Spectacle and the Hero: [The epic in film: Hollywood in the 1960s, and Abel Gance’s silent Napoléon]
- Chapter Eight Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey: [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings]
- Chapter Nine Imaginary History and Epic Fantasy: [Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion]
- Chapter Ten The Epic in Future Tense: [Frederick Turner’s three epic poems: The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse]
- Chapter Eleven Heaven and Hell Reimagined: [Tony Kushner’s Angels in America]
- Chapter Twelve Translating and Recentering Old Epics: [Contemporary translations of ancient epics and fictional adaptations by Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Madeline Miller, Maria Dahvana Headley]
- Index
Summary
Toward the end of his career, Mark Twain was in demand as an after-dinner speaker when he could be counted on for his distinctive blend of stand-up raillery and impromptu cultural criticism. On the evening of 20 November 1900, at New York's Nineteenth Century Club, the main event was Professor Caleb Thomas Winchester's talk on “The Disappearance of Literature.” Asked to make a response, Twain found himself bemused by Winchester's assertion that there were “no modern epics like Paradise Lost.” Surveying his audience, Twain quipped, “I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” With a move as smooth as a gymnast's dismount, Twain nailed the landing and dispatched at once classical literature in general, Paradise Lost in particular, and the whole prospect of epics in the modern era.
Twain's flippancy was prophetic. As the new twentieth century was about to begin, Paradise Lost's stock was also about to take a nosedive with the emergence of Modernist literature and criticism. The knotty exuberance and quirky images of the “metaphysical” poetry of John Donne and Andrew Marvell were better aligned with Modernist experiment than Milton's oratory and Latinate diction. Caleb Winchester's verdict on the disappearance of epic, to which Twain offered his hearty endorsement, seemed con-firmed at every turn. E. M. W. Tillyard's weighty The English Epic and Its Background appeared in 1954, and it established a lengthy pedigree for the English epic in the classical era and the Middle Ages, with a grand tour of Renaissance epic theory and practice in Italy, England, France and Portugal before reaching Spenser's Faerie Queene and eventually Paradise Lost. After the Milton chapter, there are fewer than a hundred pages given over to “eighteenth-century trends” before Tillyard draws the curtain, having virtually nothing to say about the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, though he prudently declined to “conjecture what will be the fate of the epic in the near future.” His book's large helpings of context for the English epic give almost no attention to post-Miltonic epic.
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- Epic Ambitions in Modern TimesFrom Paradise Lost to the New Millennium, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2022