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The would-be epic poets from the mid-14th century on were, on the one hand, drawn to the long-standing popular traditions of narrative, with their patchwork approach to the incorporation of material and a vague, generic relationship to sources and predecessors; on the other the new climate of Humanism, looking back directly to classical models, rereading them, re-evaluating them, and seeing them without the filter of medieval interpretations and urging the direct imitation and emulation of these, the clear acknowledgement of a particular master, a particular source. As they desired to establish modern, humanist credentials for their work, the choice of a model from classical literature imposed itself on all of these poets. This chapter examines the attractions, merits, and disadvantages of a series of possible models and masters, the extent to which each of them could have found in these classical predecessors an approach to epic that corresponded to his own and could be adapted to his times.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore two tightly interwoven aspects of the Renaissance epic tradition: its changing relationship with antiquity and its complex attitudes toward oral performance. This book seeks to show that a key transition in literate Europe's perception of oral culture took place in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: an emerging view of orality not simply as a fact of daily social life but as the lost and mysterious preserve of human societies far remote in space and time. It also shows how epic poets from Tasso to Milton constructed models of the past that are characterized by song and oral performance, and how, in turn, those models forced them to reassess their own art and vocation.

This chapter discusses Homer's two major Greek poems of the Odyssey that begins at the point when Odysseus was about to arrive at Troy and not when Odysseus first left to return home. It examines how Homer made Odysseus' travels a first-person narrative that is told by Odysseus himself after the events in Troy. It also points out Homer's inclusion of Athena's wrath against Odysseus' fleet and the blame for Odysseus' troubles at sea on Poseidon and Helios the sun god in his poems. The chapter explores Homer's motivation to start Odyssey at the end rather than the beginning. It mentions Aristotle, who claimed that Homer was superior to all other epic poets as he centred Odyssey's story round a 'single action'.

This chapter shows how one early European opera, Nahum Tate's and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, reflects the period's growing discomfort over epic mythmaking. Taking up the chaste Dido tradition, Dido and Aeneas explores the Virgilian epic's lost voices. It exposes the mechanics of political myths, the process by which both artists and their political masters recast history in their own ideological image. It finds charismatic authority not in the figure of the ancient bard but in a heroine whose good name has been suppressed by Virgil's imperial fiction. But in transferring the ancient mystique of the epic poet's voice to that of his slandered queen, Dido struggles to come to grips with the meaning of this shadowy figure from the past and her enigmatic vocality.

This chapter discusses the breakup of the traditional epic into an array of cultural forms in the late seventeenth century that both preserved and challenged its legacy. Ancient codes of martial heroism jostled against newer models of human inwardness; in many genres, attention shifted from sovereigns to their subjects, from male to female protagonists, from feudal violence to domestic family conflicts. Earlier beliefs about the ancient poets' mystical charisma were displaced by mechanical, acoustic, and psychophysiological theories about the effects of music on the body. Such arguments tended to steer vocal music away from the humanist arts of rhetoric and oratory and back toward the sciences.

This chapter argues that Hellenistic Jews, far from being exclusively resistant to Greek literary culture (although they could be), often deployed highly sophisticated techniques to merge biblical and epic heritage. This began with the etymologizing of Jerusalem as Hierosolyma, suggesting a link with the Iliadic Solymoi, but there was also a brief flowering of Jewish epic poets, whose rich output shows an extraordinary facility with the two traditions—and an extraordinary self-awareness about the implications of combining them.

The decorum of epic poetry prohibited a too-explicit concern with history. To compose an epic that would memorialize the mythic past might then be taken as a way to avoid talking about, and so to forget, the recent past. Ancient readers took it for granted that epic poets, while fashioning their mythical narratives, would deal with history in quite careful and pointed ways, as Servius explains that Vergil does with regard to certain painful episodes in the civil wars of the first century BCE.

This chapter talks about John Stuart Blackie with regard to the crofters of the Highlands. Blackie made his first Highland tour in August and September of 1847, travelling from Inverness through the Great Glen to Fort William and Ballachulish. These were the years of the potato famine in the Highlands, but Blackie was not yet interested in the condition of the crofters. On the basis of comparison of etymology and form, Blackie rejected the old idea of affinity between Gaelic and Hebrew in favour of one between Gaelic and Latin. Though his philology was weak, there was no doubting the passion of his conclusion. Blackie was neither an outright sceptic, nor a believer in their absolute authenticity, but clearly hoped that Gaelic too had its own Homeric epic-poet — perhaps a little too fervently. His image as friend of the crofter was added to the folklore of the Scottish diaspora, his use of Isaiah much quoted by New Zealand land reformers.

Timothy Parrish’s “Ralph Ellison’s Three Days: The Aesthetics of Political Change” argues that in Three Days, Ellison transcends the novel form, becoming an epic poet through prose that resembled fiction, history, and myth simultaneously, creating what he calls Ellison’s Book of America. As a true modernist novelist, kin to Louis Armstrong and James Joyce, Ellison understood that the modern novel is never truly finished; like Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities, whose aesthetic premise depended on its not being finished, Three Days both rejects and creates history. Parrish terms Ellison “the great modernist redactor of African American experience.” In ways that Ellison could not recognize, he did not finish the second novel because it could not be finished. Like the Civil Rights movement from which it emerged, Three Days is an incomplete project, unable to end “until the story of America and its struggle to realize its Edenic promises ends too.”