The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past
eBook - PDF

The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

  1. 256 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

About this book

This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the oral cultures of their ancestors. Welch shows how the period’s writers imagined lost civilizations built on speech and song—from Homeric Greece and Celtic Britain to the Americas—and struggled to reconcile this oral inheritance with an early modern culture of the book. Welch’s wide-ranging study offers a new perspective on Renaissance Europe’s epic literature and its troubled relationship with antiquity.

Anthony WelchĀ is assistant professorĀ of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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Yes, you can access The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past by Anthony Welch in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism in Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Introduction
  4. ONE Tasso’s Silent Lyre
  5. TWO The Oldest Song: Ronsard and Spenser
  6. INTERCHAPTER The Lutanist and the Nightingale
  7. THREE Harps in Babylon: Cowley, Davenant, Butler
  8. FOUR Milton’s Lament
  9. FIVE Epic Opera
  10. Coda: The Singer Withdraws
  11. Notes
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index