Open Access Unrestricted online access star

In ancient Greece, epic, as a literary genre, was largely overshadowed by the preeminent place the "divine Homer" was granted in all fields of culture. Considered as a model of all forms of poetry, but also of literature as a whole, and, above all, as the source of all kinds of knowledge, Homer is irreducible to the epic genre. However, his being considered as the authority in this field leaves little room for other poets. Moreover, in those times and unlike, for example, tragedy or comedy, epic did not have a name of its own: it was often referred to as poiēsis, "poetry", or it was given various names according to the verse used, the dactylic hexameter.However, grammarians of the Imperial and Byzantine periods attempted to define epic poetry. The present book is based on these late conceptions, while tracing back their evolution from older texts. Herodotus, Plato and, of course, Aristotle already gave partial and biased definitions, which were very influential.Questions still remain today: what were the various names of the epic genre? How was it characterized? How did the Ancients classify it within literary genres? Analysing the way definitions of the epic genre were constructed and providing access to a corpus of theoretical texts here translated for the first time, the book, which is also aimed at a non-Hellenist audience, will be useful to anyone interested in the theories of the epic, and more broadly, in theories about literary genres.

Creative Commons Licence cc by-nc-nd cc https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

fre

Freely available e-book