Home  About us  Contact
 

Epic Poetry (epic + poetry)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

ON HISTORY CONSIDERED AS EPIC POETRY

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2005
JOSÉ CARLOS BERMEJO BARRERA
ABSTRACT This essay defines history as an interaction of three elements: description, evocation, and expression. These three elements should interact and combine without any of them over-whelming the remaining two. In combining the three elements, history carries on from epic poetry, which was its source. Highlighting the three elements reveals the ways history synthesizes the three historical stages outlined by Comte, namely, the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. [source]

OF EAGLES AND CROWS, LIONS AND OXEN: Blake and the Disruption of Ethics

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 1 2009
D. M. Yeager
ABSTRACT Why focus on the work of William Blake in a journal dedicated to religious ethics? The question is neither trivial nor rhetorical. Blake's work is certainly not in anyone's canon of significant texts for the study of Christian or, more broadly, religious ethics. Yet Blake, however subversive his views, sought to lay out a Christian vision of the good, alternated between prophetic denunciations of the world's folly and harrowing laments over the wreck of the world's promise, and wrote poetry as if poetry might mend the world. Setting imagination against the calculations of reason and the comfort of custom, Blake's poems inspire questions about the relationship of ethics to prophecy, and open the possibility that ethics itself would be markedly enriched could it find a place for what Thomas J. J. Altizer has called Christian epic poetry. [source]

OVID'S VARIATIONS ON ACHILLES IN THE METAMORPHOSES,

BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2004
LUIGI GALASSO
He embodies in the most emblematic way the protagonist of epic poetry, a character that is a symbol for the heroic epos. The episodes which concern him are discussed, in order to demonstrate that the hasty and simplistic portrayal of him that has been given by many critics is inappropriate, and we should avoid defining, him as a merely negative figure. Actually, the structure of the narration should be perceived as a series of independent scenes. Unity is given by the constantly recurring theme of fame, of glory, which ultimately moulds life. Hence the absolutely decisive role of the poet who creates this reality. [source]