Introduction: What is the Epic?

Abstract

This book seeks to describe the history of the epic in Western culture, ending with evocations of the epic in literature and film in the English-speaking world. In order to do so, it must first ask the obvious question: What is the epic? Unfortunately, however, there is no equally obvious answer. Ours is an age in which ‘epic’ describes not just the likes of the Odyssey and Paradise Lost, but a bewildering range of texts, in the loosest sense of the word. The label ‘epic’ is applied today to contemporary novels, Hollywood blockbusters and rock songs, as well as ‘real-life’ events: sporting contests, corporate takeovers, political elections, court cases.^l At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the epic, or at least the label ‘epic’, is ubiquitous. How, then, do we deal with this ubiquity? We could presume that the label has become useless in its frequency, merely an overexposed and imprecise adjective suggesting size and significance. Or, intrigued by the polysemy of the word, we could look more closely at it, for it reveals two things. It suggests a modern or, more accurately, postmodern fascination with the epic, and a need to invoke it in all kinds of texts and situations. It also suggests an accumulation of definitions, a piling on, as it were, of different meanings from different points in the epic’s history. Thus, the epic’s efflorescence today is, first, an intriguing moment in its development and, second, a reflection of that development; that is, a reflection of past moments.