The epic in world literature

Abstract

The heroic epic — a genre of oral and written literature consisting of tales about extraordinary actions and events in a mythological or pseudo-historical past — emerged in the period of early-state formation and of the tribal confederations that preceded it. However, it continued to fourish well after the end of this era, when earlier forms were reinterpreted (often in the spirit of national patriotism) and formed the basis of lateepic genre structures. The archaic epic remained faithful to the mythological interpretation of narrated events, and its plots reveal biographical patterns of the archaic “heroic tale”. In the “classical” epic images of epic heroes and their antagonists become demythologised, demonic foes are replaced by generalized fgures of historical enemies, and epic conficts begin to refect real historic events. The epic, however, is not a blurred, primitive record of history, but an act of constructing a new — epic — world and a new — epic — model of history on the basis of historical recollections. Finally, the term literary epic, commonly applied to no more than two dozen works in world literature, is used in folkloristics and literary studies to designate texts of ancient and medieval literature which supposedly directly refect underlying oral epic traditions, but which subsequently obtained their fnal shape in the process of literary fxation.