Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton / Edition 1

by David Quint

Overview

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 Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné'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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691015200
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	02/14/1993
Series:	Literature in History , #1
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction 3

Pt. 1 Epic and the Winners 19

1 Epic and Empire: Versions of Actium 21

2 Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid 50

Pt. 2 Epic and the Losers 97

3 The Epic Curse and Camoes' Adamastor 99

4 Epics of the Defeated: The Other Tradition of Lucan, Ercilla, and d'Aubigne 131

Pt. 3 Tasso and Milton 211

5 Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme liberata 213

6 Tasso, Milton, and the Boat of Romance 248

7 Paradise Lost and the Fall of the English Commonwealth 268

8 David's Census: Milton's Politics and Paradise Regained 325

Pt. 4 A Modern Epilogue 341

9 Ossian, Medieval "Epic," and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky 343

Notes to the Chapters 369

Index 427