General

Extract

Structures of Epic Poetry is a monumental, four-volume compendium which aims to classify, analyse, and compare epic structures across Greek and Latin epic poems (and beyond) in a systematic and overarching way. While the individual Bauformen (‘structural elements’) have been the focus of the study of epic for decades, a comprehensive analysis providing a systematic overview of all structural elements in the totality of ancient epic is obviously not a one-person job. The editors, Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann, gathered an international group of experts for this herculean task. The compendium provides a set of broad cross-sectional papers on the individual epic structural elements, using a consistent terminology. It has to be said that the editors’ understanding of what constitutes an epic structural element is very broad: it includes the ‘type-scenes’, but also the narrative patterns such as catalogue and ecphrasis, and stylistic hallmarks such as similes; in fact, structural elements as understood by the editors come closest to genre markers.