Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton - Brossura

Quint, David

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0691015201 ISBN 13: 9780691015200

Casa editrice: Princeton University Press, 1993

Riassunto

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.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

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).

Contenuti:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	3
Pt. 1	Epic and the Winners	19
1	Epic and Empire: Versions of Actium	21
2	Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid	50
Pt. 2	Epic and the Losers	97
3	The Epic Curse and Camoes' Adamastor	99
4	Epics of the Defeated: The Other Tradition of Lucan, Ercilla, and d'Aubigne	131
Pt. 3	Tasso and Milton	211
5	Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata	213
6	Tasso, Milton, and the Boat of Romance	248
7	Paradise Lost and the Fall of the English Commonwealth	268
8	David's Census: Milton's Politics and Paradise Regained	325
Pt. 4	A Modern Epilogue	341
9	Ossian, Medieval "Epic," and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky	343
	Notes to the Chapters	369
	Index	427

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Princeton University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0691015201
• ISBN 13: 9780691015200
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 444