
This volume is the masterpiece of Chao Gejin, one of the best-known Chinese scholars of epic studies, during the last several decades between the 20th and 21st centuries. The discussion ranges from Homeric and Indo-European epics to renewed discoveries of age-old African...

This volume charts the development of the genre over the course of the twentieth century, traces the formation of theoretical systems, and introduces the author's own explorations of the 20th-century Mongolian bard Arimpil's singing of his native epic poetry.