Epic as genre

Epic is a narrative genre characterized by its length, scope, and subject matter. The defining characteristics of the genre are mostly derived from its roots in ancient epic poems such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

The use of epic as a genre, specifically epic poetry, dates back millennia, all the way to the Epic of Gilgamesh, widely agreed to be the first epic.

Gilgamesh is an epic poem written in Akkadian during the late 2nd millennium BC. He was possibly am historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk and was posthumously deified.

More recent English poetry epics are Milton's Paradise Lost, 1663, (the biblical story of man's creation and fall) and Tennyson's Idylls of the King, 1885, (about King Arthur and the knights of the round table.)

NOTE: the subject of the epic is generally "history," stories occurring in a significant period from the past of a country, society, or culture that focus on “decisive battles," “turning points,” and “key figures.” (Ray Callahan)

Epic characteristics

Generally defined as "a long narrative poem that recounts heroic details," with similarities to the ballad, a shorter poem recounting heroic historic stories.

Epics are usually extensive prolonged narratives, often in multiple books. The Raj Quartet would be an example—four novels by Paul Scott, made into The Jewel in the Crown by PBS.

The subject matter dwells on the achievements of an historical or traditional hero or a person of national or international significance. Every epic extols the valour, deeds, bravery, character and personality of a man who has incredible physical and mental traits. For this reason, exaggeration is also an important part of an epic.

Most epics also include a supernatural element, such as gods, demons, angels, fairies, and so on.

Epic characteristics

Morality is another key element of the epic. The poet’s foremost purpose in writing an epic is to give a moral lesson to his readers. For instance, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a perfect example, justifying God's ways to man through Adam's story.

The theme of each epic is sublime, elegant, and has universal significance. It may not be an insignificant theme that is limited only to the personality or the locality of the poet. It deals with all of humanity, or the human condition.

The diction of the traditional epic poem is lofty, grand and elegant. No trivial, common or colloquial language is used. The poet tries to use sublime words to describe the events.

The use of epic simile is another feature of an epic. Epic simile is a far-fetched comparison between two objects, which runs through many lines to describe the valour, bravery and gigantic stature of the hero.

Epic as genre

But the epic is no longer limited to the traditional medium of oral poetry, and has expanded to include modern mediums including film, theater, television shows, novels, and video games. The Star Wars movies, for example, are considered epic by some, as are superhero movies like Superman, Batman, and the like. Even the James Bond films have been classified as epic.

Over time, literary historians have attempted to clarify the core characteristics of the “epic” genre, primarily over the past two centuries as new mediums for storytelling emerged with developing technologies.

Most significantly, with the advent of the novel, and such classics as Tolstoy's War and Peace, the term began to be applied to novels.

Epic as genre (Oregon State University)

The nebulous definitions assigned to even the long-standing ancient epics are still a topic of discourse for today's literary academics, and have created difficulties for those attempting a decisive definition for the umbrella term of “epic” as a genre.

First, the classic epic poems were about people whose personal qualities were considered “exemplary” in their culture, civilization, or country: in other words, heroes, like Achilles and Odysseus.

Second, they took place in settings considered “universal” in one way or another: either the narrative takes place over a wide range of places and times, involves a lot of travel, or uses a single place, like the Walls of Troy, to explore ideas and themes that range widely over human experience.

Third, these early epics also invoked deities or the supernatural (Athena, Zeus, Ares, and the like).

Epic as genre

Finally, an epic is often used or read as a foundational cultural text. This last quality is particularly important for an extended definition of epic. The Iliad and the Odyssey—long poems about heroes doing heroic deeds, helped or hindered by the gods—ultimately came to represent something about a culture to itself: they were the ideals that people wanted to live up to or rebelled against by rejecting.

Today, an epic is an epic if it’s a long story about a hero that serves as an organizing point of cultural or social identity.

It might be used to describe any creative media that has a broad scope, that speaks broadly to the human condition, that is long or large, and that is ambitious in its artistic goals.

Over time, then, the connotations of the word “epic” have come to be identified not with form (oral poetry) but with the notion of being large, and looming large culturally.

Epic as genre

This description might sound overly broad, but that’s how it goes with defining a genre: the texts we identify within a genre are always changing, and so our ideas of the genre. No epic obeys all of the conventions, and that’s a testament to the immense creativity of storytellers.

Previously, we read Cold Mountain, by Charles Frasier, frequently cited as an epic novel because it deals with the American Civil War, particularly the aftermath for its wounded hero Inman who wants just to return home, to family, peace, and farming.

He escapes from the hospital and undertakes the journey, encountering a wide variety of characters along the way, who provide a wide variety of experiences, often tests or trials, before he finally arrives home. It is an adventure, a troublesome journey, fraught with danger and challenges that test both his moral and physical fortitude. He learns lessons along the way, proves his worth as a human being. You might say the novel is a parable for life itself.

But it's also tragic as well as epic, because he does indeed return home once again, but dies.

Epic novels—history and historical fiction

Epics novels are basically historical fiction. They recount important times and people during significant periods in a country's or culture's formation.

Ray Callahan—course description for MALS

Historians, confronting the confusion and strangeness of the past, try to make it more comprehensible by organizing their narratives around a significant event or personality. Hence the fascination with “decisive battles,” “turning points,” and “key figures.”

The shapers of popular culture–poets, painters. novelists and, in our time, film makers and television producers–take this narrative convenience and spin myths around it. The end result is that what happened and why becomes obscured and what is believed to have happened is often a literary or cinematic construct.

You might say, by making the story "mythic," they give it some level of epic status, because exaggeration is an accepted characteristic of epic. However, "myth" also implies falsifying historical fact. And fictionalizing history has led to the "history wars."

Epic novels—history and historical fiction

For example, Walter Scott, generally considered the "father" of the historical novel as a genre (for a time), is the author of the Waverley novels, many of which recount the struggles between Scotland and England. These novels were important "myths" in the literature of Scottish nationalism, until devolution.

(see Mel Gibson in Braveheart about Sir William Wallace, a late-13th century Scottish warrior who led the Scots in the First War of Scottish Independence against King Edward I of England.)

Walter Scott's novels have in recent years been re-defined as historical romance (more myth than fact?)

So, the question posed in Ray Callahan's course description is what has come to be known as the "history wars." Kate Grenville's The Secret River is the prime example.

Epic Novel

In that novel, Kate Grenville takes on the stories behind the origins of Australia's culture, particularly the treatment of its indigenous people by the early settlers.

It is the story of William Thornhill, an Englishman transported to Australia in the early 1800s as punishment for theft, who attempts to impose his country's values, behaviors, attitudes on a foreign culture without even a brief attempt to get to know or understand it. He succeeds, but at a terrible cost. It is his wife Sal, and one son, who actually get to know the people and culture into which they have moved, and accord them respect.

Because of its scope, that novel might very well be called epic. It records the conflict between British settlers and the "First Nations" people they encountered as they took over and created Australia as we now know it.

But, what we may also be seeing is a genre in transition. While male authors focus on the "decisive battles" and "key figures" or heroes in these conflicts, women authors tend to focus on the impact of tumultuous times on the daily lives of everyday people caught in the fray.

Epic Novel

Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale does just that. It's the story of two French women who deal with the German occupation of their country during WWII, and their diverse responses to the enemy-- Vianne Mauriac and Isabelle Rossignol.

Vianne, the older sister, is a married schoolteacher raising her 8-year-old daughter Sophie. Her husband enlists in the French army and is subsequently taken prisoner. She attempts to maintain her home, despite the fact that German officers are billeted there. Although the first officer treats her respectfully, the second one rapes her and she becomes pregnant.

Isabelle, younger and more impetuous, takes a more active role, becoming a member of the resistance effort and ultimately helping downed Allied airmen escape across the border. She's caught, and tortured, ultimately freed, but dies. To immortalize her life, Isabelle's lover names his daughter after her..

I'm particularly interested in these two novels because they provide a woman's perspective on larger historical events, and may therefore be considered "female epics."

Epic as genre

In recent years, female authors have written historical novels about the overlooked, forgotten, or marginalized roles that women played in historical events.

Kate Quinn, for example, features the women of Bletchley Park in The Rose Code, and a Russian sharpshooter and pilots during WWII in Diamond Eye and The Huntress, all based in historical fact, but fictionalized. While some recent authors focus on a single individual (like A Woman of No Importance), others are more inclusive, focusing on a group of women working together—such as Kate Quinn's The Alice Network. Or, another way of looking at it, the woman featured in such novels is representative of "womanhood."

These women authors provide an alternative perspective to the topics featured in men's epic novels and may therefore require an alternative definition of what constitutes an epic.

Out of Africa as epic

Although Out of Africa is a memoir, with Karen Blixen as narrator, the book focuses on Africa and the people she meets there rather than on her own experience. Most memoirs focus on "I," but Karen is not specifically mentioned until the end of Part 2. She's known early, and throughout the book, as Mbasa, a name given her by the Kikuyu--an African name.

The book is a series of stories about the people Karen meets and those who work for her, but it is about them, not her.

She reveals Africa and its people rather than herself, or reveals herself only indirectly as she interacts with them. In the end, it is about her enlightment, her education, her change of perspective, her insight as she comes to know these people. But the "star" of the book is Africa, its people, its cultures, its natural beauty, its way of life, rather than Karen.

The African tribes often ask her to intervene and render judgment in difficult tribal matters, such as "justice" instead of "law." She's respected, given stature among the tribes

Although these don't qualify as "epic stature" in the male-authored poems, they might be considered "epic qualities" in a female-authored story.

Out of Africa as epic

At the very beginning of the book, Dinesen describes her intention, and her perspective, as "Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent."

So hers is the story of a continent and its people, at a specific time; that scope is characteristic of epic novels.

The classic epic is also based on story-telling in the oral tradition; it focused on the heroic adventures and physical triumphs of a "larger than life" man who saved family, culture, country from peril and by doing so exemplified the moral values representative of that culture or country.

Dinesen is a story-teller, as her many volumes of "tales" establish. And she was thoroughly educated in the mythic and historic tales of Denmark, as well as other countries. So, Out of Africa is a compendium of "tales" about its peoples and cultures. They are the focus of the novel.

Out of Africa as epic

Although Karen is the narrator, she is not the "protagonist," or "hero," of the story. For one thing, she's female, and epics, both classic and modern, cast heroic men and their exploits as the center of attention.

And, hers is not exactly a success story; the book recounts in detail the many problems, challenges, trials and tribulations that she faced and largely overcame, but by the end of the book, bad weather, poor harvests, and insects have defeated her. She sells the farm and moves back to Denmark.

The "triumph" in this novel is not the defeat of one man by another, but is her insight and perspective on Africa; she has introduced her readers to the "real" Africa—its land, its people, its cultures. And she has treated them with respect. She has opened up this world to readers largely unfamiliar with this continent and provided a more inclusive and understanding perspective that accepts the differences, highlights them, and contrasts them with the European perspective of the time.

Out of Africa as epic

The only other characters who share her perspective are Denys Finch Hatton and Berkeley Cole. They might have been the traditional epic heroes, but the story is not about them. And they both die during the story.

Given these characteristics, Out of Africa could be considered a "foundational cultural text" and thereby qualify as "epic."

"The West" as epic material

In his description of historical empires, Ray Callahan also suggest that the American "winning of the West" might be included as an appropriate topic.

But in an article published in 1961, titled "John Williams Considers the Literary Western (or Lack Thereof)," he asks:

Given the dense history of the American West, nearly unexplored in its most fundamental aspects and potentially the richest of American myths, why has there not emerged a modern novelist of the first rank to deal adequately with the subject?

Why has the West not produced an equivalent of New England’s’ Melville or Hawthorne—or, in modern times, of the South’s Faulkner or Warren?

He argues that "the subject of the West has undergone a process of mindless stereotyping by a line of literary racketeers [dime novelists], . . . men contemptuous of the stories they have to tell, of the people who animate them, and of the settings upon which they are played."

"The West" as epic material

He continues that unfortunately "the history of the West has been nearly taken over by the romantic regionalist, almost always an amateur historian with an obsessive but sentimental concern for Western objects and history, a concern which is consistently a means of escaping significance rather than a means of confronting it."

Perhaps he's been looking in the wrong place. The novels of the West that have stood the test of time, and won some literary awards, are those by Edna Ferber and Willa Cather.

In a previous course, we read Willa Cather's novels of life on the Great Plains, such as O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.

Edna Ferber's novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into a musical), Cimarron (1930; adapted into the 1931 film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), Giant (1952; also made into the 1956 film) and Ice Palace (1958).

And so, we will take a look at So Big, specifically as a "female epic," potentially.

The female epic (Wikipedia)

The female epic is a concept in literary criticism that seeks to expand generic boundaries by identifying ways in which women authors have adapted the masculine epic tradition to express their own heroic visions.

Historically, epic literature has been considered an exclusively male domain, to the extent that "epic and masculinity appear to be almost coterminous." From Homer's Iliad to Milton's Paradise Lost, the epic canon has been defined by works authored by men, and the characteristic subject matter and diction have connotations of masculinity.

Recently, however, feminist literary critics have identified a number of texts written by women which, they argue, deserve to be considered epics, as they have many of the required qualities: emphasis on heroism, nation building, religious authority, a strong quest motif, and significant length.

Because these texts post-date Milton's Paradise Lost—conventionally considered the last authentic epic in the Western tradition—they are by default "modern epics." However, argue these critics, . . . the epic remains an authentic and vital literary genre, and one to which women have made valuable contributions.

A "dab" of litcrit

Epic and Novel: “Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” is an essay written by Mikhail Bakhtin in 1941 that compares the novel to the epic; it was one of the major literary theories of the twentieth century.

The essay was originally given as a paper in the Moscow Institute of World Literature on 24 March 1941 under the name "The Novel as a Literary Genre." However, it became well known after its 1970 publication (under its current name) in the Russian journal Questions of Literature. It was re-published in a 1975 collection of Bakhtin's writings, Questions of Literature and Aesthetics. Bakhtin framed this article as a study in the philosophy of genres.

In this essay, Bakhtin attempts to outline a theory of the novel and its unique properties by comparing it to other literary forms, in particular the epic. He sees the novel as capable of achieving much of what other forms cannot, including an ability to engage with contemporary reality, and an ability to re-conceptualize the individual in a complex way that interrogates his subjectivity and offers the possibility of redefining his own image.

A "dab" of litcrit

He also stresses the novel's flexibility: he argues it is a genre with the unique ability to constantly adapt and change, partly because there is no generic canon of the novel as there is for epic or lyric poetry.

The epic, on the other hand, is a "high-distance genre." That is, its form and structure situate it in a distant past that assumes a finished quality, meaning it cannot be re-evaluated, re-thought or changed by us.

Bakhtin compares the novel to clay, a material which can be remodeled, and the epic to marble, which cannot. The epic past is one that is irretrievable and idealized: it is valorized in a way that makes it appear hierarchically superior to the present.

The epic form is a "walled" one, meaning it builds boundaries which block it off from the present. The individual in the epic is a fully finished and completed lofty hero who is entirely "externalized": his appearance, actions and internal world are external characteristics which are literally expressed in the written word.

A "dab" of litcrit

While Bakhtin does make reference to proto-novels in antiquity, he places the rise of the modern novel in the Renaissance and suggests that it developed then precisely because of a new temporal perspective: man had become conscious of the present not only as a continuation of the past, but also as an "heroic and new beginning." This allowed the novel, a genre that was concerned with the possibilities of the present, to flourish. The novel was "the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it" and was therefore the most apt form for literary expression in the modern world.

One interesting observation in the essay is the ability of the novel to influence and "novelize" other genres. Bakhtin argues that the prominence of the novel caused other genres to adapt themselves and try to treat time in the same way as the novel. He gives the specific example of Lord Byron's Childe Harold as a poem that adopted certain novelistic features.

Truck farms (Wikipedia)

Traditionally, "market garden" was used to contrast farms devoted to raising vegetables and berries, a specialized type of farming. . . . , called "gardens" not because of size, but because English-speaking farmers traditionally referred to their vegetable plots as "gardens." A "market garden" was simply a vegetable plot, the produce of which the farmer used to sell as opposed to use to feed his or her family.

Market gardens are necessarily close to the markets, i.e. cities, that they serve.

Truck farms produce vegetables for market. The word 'truck' in "truck farms" does not refer to transportation, but rather the old French word troquer, which means "barter" or "exchange." The use for vegetables raised for market can be traced back to 1784 and truck farms to 1866.

Dutch Truck Farmers