Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction by Christopher N. Phillips

By Christopher N. Phillips

The epic calls to brain the recognized works of old poets reminiscent of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. those lengthy, narrative poems, outlined via valiant characters and heroic deeds, have a good time occasions of serious significance in precedent days. during this thought-provoking learn, Christopher N. Phillips exhibits in usually remarkable methods how this exalted classical shape proved as important to American tradition because it did to the nice societies of the traditional world.

Through shut readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Sigourney, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, in addition to the transcendentalists, Phillips lines the wealthy heritage of epic in American literature and artwork from early colonial instances to the overdue 19th century. Phillips indicates that faraway from fading within the smooth age, the epic shape was once continually remade to border a center section of American cultural expression. He unearths the rationale in the back of this sustained recognition within the ancient interrelationship one of the malleability of the epic shape, the belief of a countrywide tradition, and the status of authorship―a robust dynamic that prolonged way past the limits of literature.

By finding the epic on the middle of yankee literature and tradition, Phillips’s ingenious examine yields a few vital unearths: the early nationwide interval used to be a time of radical experimentation with poetic shape; the epic shape used to be an important to the advance of constitutional legislations and the professionalization of visible arts; engagement with the epic synthesized a big selection of literary and inventive types in efforts to release the us into the sector of worldwide literature; and a few writers formed their careers round revising the epic shape for his or her personal reasons.

Rigorous archival study, cautious readings, and lengthy chronologies of style outline this magisterial paintings, making it a useful source for students of yank experiences, American poetry, and literary history.

Show description

Read Online or Download Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction PDF

Best epic books

Deadhouse Gates (The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book 2)

Uploader be aware: bought from Amazon and stripped myself.

In the giant dominion of 7 towns, within the Holy barren region Raraku, the seer Sha'ik and her fans organize for the long-prophesied rebellion referred to as the Whirlwind. extraordinary in dimension and savagery, this maelstrom of fanaticism and bloodlust will embroil the Malazan Empire in a single of the bloodiest conflicts it has ever identified, shaping destinies and giving start to legends . . .
Set in a brilliantly discovered global ravaged through darkish, uncontrollable magic, this exciting novel of battle, intrigue and betrayal confirms Steven Erikson as a storyteller of breathtaking ability, mind's eye and originality--the writer who has written the 1st nice delusion epic of the hot millennium.

Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles, Bk. 3)

After decades of peace within the Lands of guys, there got here Dragon climate: a wave of terrific warmth, oppressive humidity, darkish indignant clouds . . . and dragons. Dragons without regret, no sympathy, no need for people; dragons who destroyed a whole village and everybody in it. every body, that's, other than the younger boy Arlian.

Imajica (The Fifth Dominion, Book 1)

The paranormal story of ill-fated enthusiasts misplaced between worlds teetering at the fringe of destruction, the place their ardour holds the most important to flee. There hasn't ever been a ebook like Imajica. reworking each expectation offantasy fiction with its heady mingling of radical sexuality and non secular anarchy, it has carried its hundreds of thousands of readers into areas of ardour and philosophy that few books have even tried to map.

Additional info for Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction

Sample text

The last two books of Paradise Lost, which contain Adam’s vision of futurity with commentary by the archangel Michael, have sparked critical controversy for a century and more. The most famous of critical statements concerning these books is that by C. S. ” Milton’s style in these books certainly does differ from that of the first ten books, in the relatively bare narration and relentless forward drive of the story. But what interests me is not so much the debate over the stylistic merit of Books XI and XII as what the debate has bracketed: Adam’s vision continues not only up to Milton’s time but all the way to “the world’s great period,” the Second Coming of Christ and the foundation of the New Heaven and New Earth.

This marks the first time in the history of epic visions of futurity—a device that Milton would have traced back to Homer—that the vision moves temporally beyond the author’s own era. If the great ekphrastic moment in an epic (such as Achilles’s shield) is a hermeneutic for the work itself, as has often been argued, then the vision of futurity provides an apology, or more precisely a teleology, for the work. In the Odyssey, this teleology belongs exclusively to the past, tied up in the life and death of Odysseus; in his prophecy at the edge of the underworld, Teiresias predicts only as far as the circumstances of the hero’s death.

Holmes’s aptly named Belleview, where seeing and being seen are just as important as reading and being read to—both for the men and for the women. A distinct lack of visibility seems to have motivated Phillis Wheatley’s own representation of herself as a reader of epic. In her case, she downplays the difference of gender by emphasizing her role as a solitary though mentored reader, a student of epic along much more male lines than either Mrs. Holmes or even the learned Elizabeth Graeme. Wheatley’s status as a poet depended on her being able to convince white, educated men that she could read like them, and she aimed to do just that from the first poem in her collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.96 of 5 – based on 25 votes