Introduction

Summary

TWO IMMODEST AMBITIONS DRIVE THIS STUDY: to fill what has been perceived as a major gap in Goethe's œuvre and to initiate a radical new reading of Faust. The means to both ends is showing that Faust properly belongs in the sequence of works — including Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated, and Milton's Paradise Lost — that together constitute the system of European epic. Attempts to define epic much more specifically than Aristotle did, who had described it as a long poem reporting the actions of “people who are to be taken seriously,” quickly become exercises in the fallacy of begging the question. A given work is an epic because it displays epic forms and features, but those are known from works considered to be epics. Trying to avoid the trap of logic, Franco Moretti opts for a deliberately vague definition of epic as “a hypothesis designed to introduce a little order into a question too important to remain so confused.” Well, perhaps too little order. More useful is the pragmatism of Brian Wilkie's solution when he proposes

that we can best understand epic not as a genre governed by fixed rules, whether prescriptive or inductive, but as a tradition. It is a tradition, however, that operates in an unusual way, for although, like any tradition, it is rooted in the past, it typically rejects the past as well, sometimes vigorously and with strident contempt. The great paradox of the epic lies in the fact that the partial repudiation of earlier epic tradition is itself traditional.