Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community

Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community

Edited By Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford

© 1999 The Regents of the University of California

Preferred Citation: Beissinger, Margaret, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford, editors. Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1999 1999. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft40000565/

INTRODUCTION

SECTION ONE—  ON THE MARGINS OF THE SCRIBAL:  FROM ORAL EPIC TO TEXT

1—  Epic as Genre

2—  Performing Interpretation:  Early Allegorical Exegesis of Homer

3—  The Arabic Epic Poet as Outcast, Trickster, and Con Man

4—  Epic, Gender, and Nationalism:  The Development of Nineteenth-Century Balkan Literature

SECTION TWO—  EPIC AND AUTHORITY

5—  Metamorphosis, Metaphor, and Allegory in Latin Epic

6—  Tasso's Trees:  Epic and Local Culture

7—  Appropriating the Epic:  Gender, Caste, and Regional Identity in Middle India

SECTION THREE—  THE BOUNDARIES OF EPIC PERFORMANCE

8—  Problematic Performances:  Overlapping Genres and Levels of Participation in Arabic Oral Epic-Singing

9—  Worshiping Epic Villains:  A Kaurava Cult in the Central Himalayas

SECTION FOUR—  EPIC AND LAMENT

10—  The Natural Tears of Epic

11—  The Poetics of Loss in Greek Epic

12—  The Role of Lament in the Growth and Eclipse of Roman Epic

SECTION FIVE—  EPIC AND PEDAGOGY

13—  Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale:  Virgil, Ovid, Spenser, and Native American Aetiology

14—  Walcott's Omeros :  The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World

Notes

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS