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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 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.
List of contents
Acknowledgments Pt. 1Epic and the Winners 1Epic and Empire: Versions of Actium 2Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid Pt. 2Epic and the Losers 3The Epic Curse and Camoes' Adamastor 4Epics of the Defeated: The Other Tradition of Lucan, Ercilla, and d'Aubigne Pt. 3Tasso and Milton 5Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata 6Tasso, Milton, and the Boat of Romance 7Paradise Lost and the Fall of the English Commonwealth 8David's Census: Milton's Politics and Paradise Regained Pt. 4A Modern Epilogue 9Ossian, Medieval "Epic," and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky Notes to the Chapters Index
About the author
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).
Summary
Explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. This book covers 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.
