The Epic Imaginary

by Charlton Payne

This study analyzes how the imagination of the epic genre as legitimately legitimating community also unleashes an ambivalence between telling coherent - and hence legitimating - stories of political community and narrating open-ended stories of contingency that might de-legitimate political power. Manifest in eighteenth-century poetics above all in the disjunction between programmatic definitions of the epic and actual experiments with the genre,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 311027194X
• ISBN13: 9783110271942
• Release Date: June 2012
• Publisher: de Gruyter
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 22 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary