The Classical Epic Tradition
John Kevin Newman
The University of Wisconsin Press
European literary epic is often thought of as poetry on stilts, and equally often those stilts are thought to have been fashioned in classical antiquity. In this wide-ranging work, John Kevin Newman argues that the classical epic tradition has been distorted by critical theory before, during, and since the Renaissance, and that this distortion has led in the modern world to serious misunderstandings of major poets. Newman's work will challenge all scholars, students, and general readers of the classics, comparative literature, and western literary traditions.

Newman's fresh perspective is based on a view of the classical epic as a genre defined by Greek Alexandria and the circle of Callimachus, the crucial transmitters of major epic poetry to future generations. Pursuing the forms that the Callimachean tradition has taken, from Apollonius Rhodius to Thomas Mann, the author offers a new critical understanding of epic literature.

Basic to Newman's overview is the sense that the classical epic tradition was formulated at a time when the unity of the Greek world was collapsing, and that it was the work of two figures. If Aristotle's contribution to that tradition has been acknowledged, the poet Callimachus' role has long been underrated. Yet it was Callimachus, Newman stresses, who developed the model of the new epic demanded by a new age. Sanctioning the admixture of dramatic, lyrical, and comic elements, his innovative works would influence coming generations of writers.

Newman traces the impact of the Callimachean epic on such Latin poets as Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius; on Dante and his Renaissance successors; on Milton and such Russian pioneers of film as Pudovkin and Eisenstein; and on the great epic novelists.