Description: "Epic" defines the nature of the human storyteller; recalls the creation of the world and of the human race; describes the paradoxical role of the hero as both the Everyman and the radical exception; and establishes the complex quest underlying all human action. "Epic" illustrates that these ingredients of epic storytelling are universal cultural elements.
Brief description:
Frederick Turner is Founders Professor, School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. A poet, translator, philosopher, cultural critic, and former editor of the Kenyon Review, he has authored more than two dozen books, including Beauty, The Culture of Hope, Genesis, Hadean Eclogues, Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics, and Natural Religion.
Review Quotes:
"This is a wide-ranging book which covers epic from its beginnings up to contemporary literary productions and treats of compositions in so many different languages, that, as the author points out, it would be impossible for anyone to know them all. . . . The book is crammed with ideas and images, and I can only mention some of them. . . . Epic typically took its rise when orality was giving way to literacy. It "bestrides the boundary between prehistory and history" (p. 287) and is a genre of such magnitude that it embrases the whole of its culture. Turner encourages us to enter into this vast epic space and imaginatively make ourselves at home there since "time and familiarity themselves ingrain a thing into memory" and "we must live in epic country for a while for it to work its transformation on us" (341)."
--Emily Lyle, Cosmos
"Turner's overwhelming advantage in writing about Epics is that he is one of our great contemporary poets in that genre. It is as though we equipped Tasso or Vergil with a polymath education in the physical, evolutionary, and social sciences and asked them to use this knowledge to tell us what they were doing. Turner understands that they would come to the same conclusion he does: there are not many epics, there is one epic and that is the story of human evolutionary history from the creation of mankind to the creation of the city, and everything on the way (visit to the dead) and after (destruction and recreation). This story of epic is an epic journey in itself: a tribal encyclopedia for latter-day tribesmen. Brilliantly and expertly told it is not to be missed at any cost."
--Robin Fox, professor of social theory, Rutgers University, and author of The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind
"There is something almost majestic about Frederick Turner's Epic, the best study ever composed about this foundational literary genre.The range is formidable: from ancient and classical works to twentieth century literary