A01=David Quint
Actium
Adamastor
Aeneid
Alcina
Allegory
Allusion
Alonso de Ercilla
Anchises
Argonautica
Aristeia
Ascanius
Author_David Quint
Battle of Actium
Bourgeoisie
Caesarism
Category=DSC
Chivalric romance
Combatant
Counter-Reformation
Dichotomy
Digression
Effeminacy
Epic poetry
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Evocation
Fiction
Foe (novel)
Genre
Homer
Ideology
Imperialism
Lentulus
Lionel Gossman
Literary theory
Literature
Majesty
Monarchy
Morgan le Fay
Narration
Narrative
National epic
Nobility
Northrop Frye
Odysseus
Orlando Furioso
Orlando Innamorato
Ossian
Palinurus
Paradise Regained
Parody
Persecution
Pharsalia
Phineas Fletcher
Poetry
Priam
Proscription
Prose
Protestantism
Punic Wars
Roman Republic
Samson Agonistes
Simile
Spaniards
Superiority (short story)
Tacitus
Teleology
The Faerie Queene
Treatise
Turnus
Virgil
War
Warfare
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691015200
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 14 Feb 1993
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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 Lusiadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigne'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.
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).
