11 EPIC AND ROMANCE
MICHAEL OCONNELL
Throughout most of Western literary history, until the rise of the novel, epic and trance were the dominant forms of extended narrative. Epic, equal supremely by the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil, held pride of place twain in terms of its antiquity and a general wizard of its seriousness in conveying the values of a civilization. The movement represented by the unequivocal epics meant that the genre itself was understood as the most ambitious to be undertaken by a poet, that a successful epic would be the artistic culmination of a civilization. Romance, on the other hand, has been the Proteus, the great shape-shifter, of narrative. If epic has been defined by its subject-matter and, to a certain extent, by the form of the three continental examples, play has proved much harder to pin down. No maven subjectmatter can be said to characterize it, no classic text gave it shape, no prestigious critical discussion considered its elements and form, as Aristotles Poetics did for epic and tragedy.
Northrop Frye, in The Secular Scripture (1976), believes romance to be the very ground of narrative, but he cannot be said so much to have finally backlash this Proteus as to have relished its many tricks. It might be argued on the basis of etymology that for the past three centuries romance has morose itself into the novel; in using a single denomination for both, Italian (il romanzo), French (le roman), and German (der Roman) all identify the romance with the novel. English, of course, insists on the distinction, and when the term romance is used in the linguistic context of discussions of the novel, it generally implies a narrative less tied to the realism of incident, plot or character thought proper to that genre. only if recent discussion of the origins of the novel, especially that by...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com
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