Epic Interactions Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic Tradition Presented to Jasper Griffin by Former Pupils

by Clarke, M. J.; Currie, B. G. F.; Lyne, R. O. A. M.

• ISBN13: 9780199276301
• ISBN10: 0199276307
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-09
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This collection of essays by former pupils of Jasper Griffin is conceived as a tribute to one of the foremost modern scholars of classical epic. The volume surveys the epic tradition from the eighth-seventh centuries BC to the nineteenth century of our era, with individual chapters focusing on specific stages of the tradition. These include: Homer and the oral epic tradition; the Homeric transformation of Indo-European and Near Eastern religious ideas; Herodotus' Histories and Homer; reactions to Homer by the ancient literary critics and the Hellenistic poets; Virgil's Aeneid in its literary and political-cultural contexts; the Augustan poets' engagement with the Aeneid; the response to Virgil in Statius' Thebaid; Old English and early Irish heroic literature; Tasso, Milton, and the Renaissance renewal of epic; and the complex attitude of the Victorians to epic. The aim of the book is to situate writers of epic in their literary and cultural contexts; the perspectives offered are synchronic and diachronic. The individual contributions, all written by established scholars, fix in each case on a single, seminal moment in the epic tradition. None the less the book invites reading in chronological sequence, for the epic tradition is seen as one in which earlier and later stages may illuminate each other reciprocally. The concept of interaction at the heart of this book is taken in different directions by the various contributors. It encompasses intertextual relationships between literary works, cross-cultural borrowings, the interrelationship of literature and criticism, construction of literary hierarchies and representations of literary dependence, and the complex interpenetration of literature and society. The chapters singly offer insights into some of the foundational poems of the European epic tradition, and together take an integrated view of that tradition as a whole. Book jacket.

Author Biography

M. J. Clarke is Lecturer in Classics, The National University of Ireland, Maynooth. B. G. F. Currie is Fellow and Tutor in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature, Oriel College, and Lecturer, Oxford University. The late R. O. A. M. Lyne was formerly Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

Conventions and Abbreviations	xi
Contributors	xii
Homer and the Early Epic Tradition	1	(46)
Bruno Currie
Homer's Religion: Philological Perspectives from Indo-European and Semitic	47	(28)
Simon Pulleyn
Homer and Herodotus	75	(30)
Christopher Pelling
Hellenistic Epic and Homeric Form	105	(26)
Gregory Hutchinson
The Aeneid: Inheritance and Empire	131	(28)
Rebecca Armstrong
The Epic and the Monuments: Interactions between Virgil's Aeneid and the Augustan Building Programme	159	(26)
Stephen Harrison
Augustan Responses to the Aeneid	185	(32)
Matthew Robinson
Statius and the Sublimity of Capaneus	217	(26)
Matthew Leigh
Achilles, Byrhtnoth, and Cu Chulainn: Continuity and Analogy from Homer to the Medieval North	243	(30)
Michael Clarke
Quantum Mutatus ab Illo: Moments of Change and Recognition in Tasso and Milton	273	(28)
Emily Wilson
The Idea of Epic in the Nineteenth Century	301	(30)
Richard Jenkyns
Epilogue	331	(44)
Bruno Currie
References	375	(38)
Index of Passages	413	(20)
General Index	433