Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

by Anthony Welch

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300178867
• ISBN13: 9780300178869
• Release Date: November 2012
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.1"