Epic Earth

Status
Not open for further replies.

Maese Delta

Banned
Epic Earth

Now I give you the welcome to this thread, a continuation to my previous thread in this forum. This is the thread where you can discuss more about written and filmed epics.

For starters, I'd like to show here what is the epic about:

The epic is a broadly defined genre of poetry, and one of the major forms of narrative literature. It retells in a continuous narrative the life and works of a heroic or mythological person or group of persons. In the West, the Iliad, Odyssey and Nibelungenlied; and in the East, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Shahnama and Epic of King Gesar are often cited as examples of the epic genre. The composition of epic poetry, or of long poems in general, has become uncommon in the Western world since the early 20th century. The term "epic" however has been recycled to refer to prose works, films, and similar works which are characterized by great length, multiple settings, large numbers of characters, or long span of time involved. As a result of this change in the use of the word, many prose works of the past may be called "epics" which were not composed or originally understood as such.

Its charasteristics are the following:

*It's an attempt of the man to comprehend the world around him (in a manner similar to the myth)
*It's a tale of fictitious events or...
*Tells about historical events of the past (and this, along with the legend and
myth, allows the people to modify some facts to make them properly for an epic story, or in other cases, to make a legend or a myth, so that people is strongly attracted to it)
*The narrator is objective, it's between the events and the author
*The tale is divided into chapters, parts (the so-called 'books')
*Its main resource is the description

Now, amongst these things, the epic shows the following:

Invocation: prayers to the inspiring muse (of the epic, or any other which the story tells about, and along with it, the gods).

Praepositio: introduction to the epic's theme

Numeratio: tells about a large group of people, and/or heroes. Also, tells about armies. (After all... what's the epic about, this is something the epic is so... well, EPIC!)

In media res: the story begins in the middle of an event (most stories have this one)

Deus ex machina: Divine intervention

Anticipatio: prediction of the events to come (here are included oracles, dreams and nightmares, revelations)

Epithet: a permanent nickname for the heroic characters.

The sub-genres of epic are these ones:

Epic poem (epopee): heroic or bellicose deeds of a person or group of persons (a whole town or nation). It's narrated in past time. Many times the heroes are overman (like super-herores). It's written in verses, divided in rhapsodies. Its style is rich, huge and magnificent, also it quite lenghty, its goal is to glorify the characters, and as background, glorify their deeds as well as weapons, cities, etc.

Novel and tale: Any kind of events, time, narrator and characters. The style may vary according to the preferences of the author, but it is written in prose, though it may sound as poems, and even include some of them.

Later, I'll update more of this thread, but I hope that you know this, and send me your comments here. Now you can comprehend many epic with this. Indeed, I hope you can find some tools and practice more about criticism with such stories.

I'll soon have some good material here for those who like to read and write these kind of stories. I have recently entered a new semester in college, so... with the usual laziness of some professors... I mean, students, and since I've got no classes in Fridays. that leaves me a good decent free time to spend here.

Maese Delta
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top