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Memories of the poor and impoverished in Serbian and South Slavic oral poetry are linked to contradictory beliefs: poverty is explained by reasons of fate, some offence, sin, or misfortune, however, the poor (as well as orphans, widows, wretched, etc.) are considered to be intermediaries between this world and the next, therefore close to God and the ancestors, and who possess certain healing and miraculous powers. These beliefs are merged and intermixed with other ideas about the poor, which entered oral tradition through human experience and everyday life, and were influenced by historical, social and economic changes (the poor who do not work or do not wish to contribute to their community, become a social threat and their lifestyle and use of welfare are disapproved of). In Serbian and South Slavic folk songs and ballads, representations of the poor and impoverished are diverse regarding aspects, such as, the selection of motifs and genre, time, place, context of recording, etc. Representations of the poor and impoverished in Serbian and South Slavic oral poetry vary from tragic to comic, from idealistic to ironic, or the subject can be depicted from a moral or realist standpoint. Poverty is usually related to the person’s private life, his or her feelings and moods, and may reflect their attitudes toward family, nature, community or society. Different portrayals of the poor and impoverished may reveal personal experiences, collective customary law and practices, way of life, ethical and religious norms, a system of values, as well as psychological motivation or background. Special attention will be paid to poverty as a fact of daily life, and to realistic details which make the songs and the characters particularly convincing and vivid.

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including colonial archival materials with and against oral traditions and epic poetry; discussion about Mwene Muji and economic policy in independent Congo.

The author explores John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost" from a theological perspective. He argues that Milton's work not only engages with classical pagan mythological themes but also transforms them into a distinctly Christian narrative. He examines how Milton incorporates pagan ideas while asserting a Christian theological vision.

We describe ongoing development for The Homer Multitext focusing on the interlocking challenges of automated analysis of diplomatic manuscript transcriptions. With the goal of lexical and morphological analysis of prose and poetry texts, and metrical analysis of poetic texts (and quotations thereof), we face the challenge of working generically across languages and across multiple possible orthographies in each language. In the case of Greek, our working dataset includes Greek following the conventions of Attica before 404 BCE, the conventions of "standard" literary polytonic Greek, and the particular conventions found in Byzantine codex manuscripts of Greek epic poetry with accompanying commentary. The latest work involves re-implementing existing CITE Architecture libraries in the Julia language, with documentation in the form of runnable code notebooks using the Pluto.jl framework. The Homer Multitext has been a work in progress for two decades. Because of the project's emphasis on simple data formats (plain text, very simple XML, tabular lists), our data remain valid even as we gain understanding of the challenges posed by our source-material, particularly the 10th and 11th Century manuscripts of Greek epic poetry with accompanying ancient commentary that, within themselves, represent over a thousand years of linguistic evolution. The work outlined here represents the latest shift in our development tools, a flexibility likewise made possible by the separation of concerns that has been a central value in the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's involvement in the reception history of the epic genre is largely unwritten. This article explores how women writers of the period used the mock heroic to write of their own histories and experiences. I propose that three distinct developments in the eighteenth-century literary landscape influenced the engagement of women writers with epic: an increasing confidence to enter the works of Homer and Virgil from the margins; the centring of women in fragmentary translations in miscellany volumes; and the rise of the mock-heroic, which diluted the boundaries between traditional and innovative topics apt for epic application. Mary Leapor, a working-class poet and kitchen maid, is not a figure naturally associated with writing in the epic mode. However, I argue that her poetry constitutes an experiment with this mode and is emblematic of the changes to eighteenth-century literary culture that opened out the classics to many readers. But where the mock-heroic often trivialised women, Leapor's mock country-house poem, "Crumble Hall" (1751), uses the classical space of the underworld to write of, elevate, and celebrate not warriors and heroes but the labouring classes. Leapor is a surprising but vital exemplar in the reception history of both the classics and epic poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between Plato and the poets has prompted numerous reflections throughout the history of philosophy. One of the privileged dialogues for understanding this relationship has been the Phaedrus, as beauty, writing, and language are domains where philosophy and poetry converge. It is not surprising, then, that there are several allusions to poets from the epic and lyric tradition such as Homer, Stesichorus, and Sappho. We will argue here that the reference to Sappho in the Phaedrus, unique in the entire Platonic corpus, implies a commitment to the feminine poetic and erotic tradition, an understanding of it as a proto-philosophical stage, and the acknowledgment of Sappho's influence on Plato's conception of Eros. In this way, not only does the consideration of the relationship between Plato and the poets expand, but it also incorporates a perspective that has not been sufficiently addressed, namely, the feminine contribution to Platonic thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Nenets epic songs, focusing on two texts collected at the beginning of the twentieth century in relation to the divergent historicities they represent. The process of gathering and publishing folklore is analysed as folklorisation, whereby the texts have come to represent a negation of the modern, but not giving voice to the singers or their communities. Nenets epic songs have served Finnish nationalism and Russian imperialism in creating hierarchies between Finns and their linguistic relatives and between different Russian ethnic groups, including Russians and the Nenets. The process of traditionalisation is discussed as a local strategy of recreating meaningful narration that relates both to tradition and other contextually relevant discourses. The songs discussed are shown to depict not specific past events, but rather Nenets historical experiences and understandings about their subaltern position and agency within the imperial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National anthems are one of the earliest forms of universal symbols which unify communities and create a strong bond among individuals. They include the significant values of a nation and arouse intense feelings since they are usually written after an important victory in a country's history and are performed orally in a loud manner altogether with a sense of identification. However, they have not undergone extended research so far in the scope of literature as the context and the performance of them have been the main focus of interest. Indeed, national anthems are regarded as not only significant components of oral culture but also contributors of the genre of epic poetry after they are put into written form. For this study, with the hope of providing further research to the area, national anthems of England, the USA and France have been selected as the core sources to be evaluated in accordance with the methodology of textual analysis. The reason behind this choice is to relate the concept of anthems to literature specifically English Literature; thus, anthems of England and the USA have been prioritized. Since these two countries have been in close interaction and had respectable relationships with France for decades, the national anthem of France has been found appropriate as the third item of the analysis. The results of the study have shown that though they may differ in tone, the level of God's influence and in the use of combining other national elements, anthems present similar patterns and are personified with the attribution of patriotic and stimulating characteristics, which result in the formation of a national identity embracing every segment of the nation holistically. It is concluded that anthems play an important part in maintaining the unity of a nation and in creating a sense of belongingness among its citizens proving once again the intrinsic unitary power of literature and literary works simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present research sought to extract the history of the concept of epic from dictionaries, texts, and press reports. In Persian, the term “Hamasah” denotes the epic genre. This equivalence has happened only recently. Earlier, the word was used in Arabic to suggest three different meanings: 1. courage, 2. Qasidas and Qetas in the Arab literature mainly revolving around the achievements of tribes and individuals, and 3. a type of poetry selection. Probably around 1828, the Arabic word “Hamasah” was considered synonymous with the epic and used to denote this notion for some time. However, after a point, Arab speakers chose the word “Malhamah” as an equivalent for the epic. In Persian, too, the word “Hamasah” has meant the same as was common in Arabic before being used to denote a literary genre. However, the instances of the usage of this word to indicate such meanings are scant in old dictionaries of Persian and are rarely used in texts. In the Persian language, the Kaveh newspaper was apparently the first to use the word “Hamasah” in its modern meaning. Notably, this newspaper was not published in Iran. Afterward, the press and books gradually began utilizing this word. However, the word continued to be used to denote its old (particularly honor and achievements) and new meanings for a while. In some instances, it was used in a way suggestive of both meanings.

This work studies the function of gongorism in Juan Blázquez Mayoralgo’s Antuerpia (c. 1620-40), epic poem about the capture of the city of Antwerp in the context of the Eighty Years War (1584-1585). It shows how the Petrarchan ideal of beauty, the hyperbatons and cultisms and the passages that evoke Luis de Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and Soledades contribute to the aggrandizement of the war apparatus of the Austrias and to the vision of the Catholic Monarchy as successor of the Roman Empire.

In the process of creating new nations with the idea of romantic nationalism rising in Europe since the 19th century, folk culture began to be of interest to European researches. This process was followed by the studies to register and publish these products. The epics regarding the historical origins of the nations, including the wars and the heroes of the nations, have all been at the center of these studies. Modern nations have tried to compile and record oral heroic epics in order to prove their nations magnificent and antiquity. Having ethnic diversity, the Balkans have been one of the prime places for the compilation and publication of oral heroic epics. These oral epic traditions have an important place in the lives of the South Slavic people, particularly the Bosnians living in the region. In order to record the South Slavic epics, many local and foreign researchers have carried out compilation activities in the Western and North-western Balkans, which contain a significant Slavic population. The close relationship of epics with nation and nationalist was not the only main reason for the increasing interest in oral epic telling traditions in the region. One of the most important discussions of 20th century Western literature research; how the Iliad and Odyssey epics were formed; whether these epics were written by one individual or by many people. In order to delve deeper into questions of, whether epics were recorded from oral traditions or copyrighted, many researchers turned their attentions to South Slavic territory, where the traditions of creating oral epics is considerably still alive. The most famous of the researchers from the 20th century Homer studies are Homerist Milman Parry and his assistant Albert Lord. While he was a doctoral student at the university of Paris Sorbonne in the 1920s, Parry became acquainted with the works of the famous Slovenian folklorist Matija Murko. Parry began to conduct field studies in the region. Starting work in the Classics Department of Harvard University in the 1930s, Parry came to Yugoslavia for the first time in 1933 and for the following two years he recorded songs from the Yugoslav region. Upon Milman Parry's sudden death in 1935, his assistant Albert Lord completed his studies. Most of the recorded material are epics. These collections are currently housed in the Widener Library at Harvard University. In addition to the material recorded by Parry and Lord, additional Southern Slavic heroic poetry, previously recorded from Zagreb and Belgrade, have also been included to the collection. In this article, the south Slavic compilation studies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, objectives and results of these studies including the materials available in the collection will be evaluated. In the final analysis, the contribution of Parry and Lords studies to the South Slavic epic studies, even if they were made for the solution of the Homeric question, will be highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Ron Silliman's Universe, a serial poetic project which, according to the publisher's description, "were [the author] to live long enough, would take him three centuries to complete." The article specifically focuses on the significance of the book's length for a general discussion of aging, poetry and temporality. One should bear in mind that Universe is not a retrospective work of synthesis but rather a present and future-oriented project. The point of departure for the article's analysis will be the following passage from Northern Soul, the second book in the series: "Page 43 / you will read / differently if / there are 94 to the book / than if there are just / 45, What about / 523 what then / little hen." Notorious for his massive tomes of verse, Silliman establishes an analogy between the length of his life and the length of his work that, blows up conventional chronological accounts of life. In this poem, death, instead of looming on the horizon, is internalized as the point of transition from one page to the next, the death of an event being the birth of another. Everyday life thus reveals itself in all its subtle variety, its generative evanescence paradoxically enriching the life of the poet. Silliman's epic poetry is not, that is, a matter of mastery or life extension (it makes no claims to totalization or immortality) but rather one of life enchantment, achieved through a greater bardic attunement to the granularities of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seventeenth-century epic poem, the Ulisseia ou Lisboa Edificada, of Gabriel Pereira de Castro, presents a complex intervention in the project of nationalist mythmaking for the Portuguese empire using the lexicon of antique reception, and especially the literary tradition as exemplified by Camões's The Lusiads, published in 1572. The poem narrates the foundation of Lisbon by Odysseus and is framed as a parergon of his famed Homeric nostos. Despite the poet's insistent claim in the opening canto to 'sing in imitation of Homer' ('espero cantar de Ulisses, imitando a Homero'), Virgil's Aeneid emerges as an essential poetic model for the text, as much at the level of bilingual intertext as in its function as a poetic reception itself of the Homeric corpus. This article elucidates Pereira de Castro's appropriation of Virgil's Aeneidqua Homeric reception and integrates the text into a totalizing tradition of epic that positions the Ulisseia in relation to the dominant national epic tradition of Camões's The Lusiads. The triangulation between three texts, the Ulisseia, the Aeneid and the Odyssey, exemplifies a receptive method I term a receptive tautology, by which one receptive turn gestures to an additional tradition, which ultimately reaffirms the status of the primary receiving text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study provides an overview of the themes and forms of epic poetry in the Czech Lands in the period before the Battle of White Mountain (1620) on the basis of a large amount of extant material. In the introduction, it outlines the problems of understanding epic poetry in antiquity and the Early Modern period, combining insights from modern neo-Latinist handbooks and experience with a corpus of Bohemical (i.e., Bohemiarelated) material to create a basic division of epic poetry applicable to poems from the Czech Lands. It divides epic poetry into secular, religious and animal poetry, with religious epic outnumbering secular poetry. Both of these include many types of poetic compositions, not all of which are typical examples of epic poetry, often straddling several genres. Classical heroic epics, as we know them from antiquity, occur little in the Bohemical material; when they do, they deal with battles with the Turks, or are genealogical epics or have biblical themes. This is related to the state of patronage and the social status of poets, which in Bohemia rarely allowed them to devote enough time to demanding epic work. Shorter epic compositions, for which the term epyllion is now also used, were more popular and more widely published, responding to a current event. The practical solution was a cycle of shorter poems, most often in chronological order – this was usually how the popular series of rulers were composed, the type of composition for which poets received the laurel wreath of poeta laureatus from the emperor. The theme of the Neo-Latin epyllia used to be descriptions of historical events, battles or natural disasters, often depicted in so-called recapitulatory strenae. Religious epic concentrates on the depiction of Christ’s life and its most important phases (birth, passion and ascension), associated at the same time with important Christian feasts. Old Testament themes, often parallel to New Testament themes or to current events, or the lives of saints, conceived differently by Catholic and non-Catholic authors, or poems about angels and their duties, are also treated. A special kind is the animal epic, represented by Jan Dubravius’s Theriobulia, a work variously interpreted as an animal epic, allegory, or mirror for princes. The presented outline of the types of epic based on the Bohemical material is not intended as a codification, but rather as a call for a discussion on the categorization of the Neo-Latin epic in the Czech Lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study aims at utilizing Seligman's theory of optimism so as to analyze "Leyli and Majnun" by Nezami in a descriptive analytical method. The actions and behavioral features of each character in this book of this book and the included concepts provided in the poems are matched with the virtues and components of optimism presented in the mentioned theory. Having collected the data in the form of graphs, the results indicated that Nezami Ganjavi, who is known as a figurehead of sciences back in his time, has paid special attention to nurturing the good human virtues and spiritual and psychological excellence of the characters (Leyli and Majnun) in his poetry. Also, The results have depicted that the characters are adorned with six virtues that are provided by Seligman's theory of optimism and these evirtues are frequently narrated in this verse as well. The so called virtues comprise Wise love, humanity and compassion for fellow human beings and even beasts, courage in loyalty between the lover and the beloved, the transcendence of existing pure love, justly ethics between the two, and the maintenance of moderation in their thoughts, actions, and behavior of Leyli and Majnun, who are the main characters of this work. It is worth-mentioning that these virtues are also applied to other people in this book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author critiques Irish poet Seamus Heaney's translation of the epic poem "Beowulf." Topics include a debate on the subject of cultural appropriation created by dialectical diction in Heaney's translation, the unsettled question of whether the dialect mystifies the text and excludes certain readers, the solution offered by Heaney to mystification problem in the introduction according to his supporters and the reason for the attention received by the dialectal word "bawn" in the translation.

Scholars have traditionally approached Jain devotional practices, or bhakti, as a "borrowing" from Hindu traditions. John E. Cort (2002) argues that this formulation of bhakti limits our understanding of Jainism's role in the early development of bhakti within Indian religions. As the birthplace of bhakti, the literature of medieval Tamil Nadu offers rich evidence of how Jain and Hindu thinkers put their distinctive stamps on the emerging devotional landscape. This paper compares the role of bhakti in the fifth-century Jain narrative epic poems Cilappatikaram and Nilakeci as well as the sixth-century poetry of the Hindu poet-saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar. Drawing on the performance-centered approach to the study of religion described by Catherinethe Bell (1998), I argue that the Jain authors of Cilappatikaram and Nilakeci stress complex ritualistic actions as the correct performance of bhakti, while the poetry of Karaikkal Ammaiyar emphasizes a form of spontaneous and ecstatic devotion towards the Hindu god Shiva. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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I argue in this essay that in some circumstances lyric poems written from the colony or the postcolony move in the direction of expressive totality by engaging with multiple worlds of reference at once. György Lukács suggested that the totality that we find in epic poetry and, to a lesser extent, in the novel, is absent from lyric poetry. In a re-reading, inflected by the Covid-19 pandemic, of two mid-twentieth-century Bengali poems written by Bishnu Dey (1909–1982), of which I provide the English translations, I illustrate how lyric poems about disaster, enacting a disorientation of the senses and a dissolution of the fixity of reference, creates transpositions across multiple worlds. In the case of these particular poems, the worlds are those of Greek myth and Indian myth, parallels among which weave intertextually together in an expressive totality. It follows that, alongside other genres, poetry too continues to be a resource with which to think our contemporary moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Book 1 of The Faerie Queene constitutes Spenser's most searching study of morbid sadness, which he associates with a wish for "careless" rest and, ultimately, for death. His account of Redcrosse's disease makes use of medieval conceptions of acedia and Renaissance ideas of melancholy, but it diverges from both, as well as from modern conceptions of depression. From the opening stanza Spenser suggests that there are two Redcrosse knights, the one consciously aggressive and eager for glory, the other "too solemn sad," desiring escape from the cares of the world. Spenser embodies this second impulse in the House of Morpheus. In the early cantos the Morpheus impulse remains accessible only in dream, but as Redcrosse deteriorates it becomes more dominant and more conscious. It next appears as Sans Joy, who undermines Redcrosse's attempts at self-glorification in the House of Pride and who (despite the young knight's seeming victory) forces him to recognize the emptiness of the ambition imaged in Lucifera's palace. Having humiliatingly fled the House of Pride, Redcrosse allows himself to be seduced by Duessa to distract himself from his incipient despair—a despair he voices in Orgoglio's dungeon as a desire for death. Despaire is the deadliest embodiment of the Morpheus impulse, no longer inchoate feeling but articulate sin. But Redcrosse's experiences in the House of Holiness and afterward suggest that he will never in life lose this weight of grief, which is part of the human condition. Spenser revisits these attacks of morbid sorrow in later episodes of his epic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a part of the creation of the saintly cult of prince Lazar, the Serbian Orthodox Church built the institutional framework which was necessary for the creation of a culture of remembrance of the Battle of Kosovo (1389). The oral tradition took over the key ideas of the church's interpretation of the battle. Still, they were mixed with the old mythicalmagical representations that, despite the centuries-old process of Christianization, were preserved among the Serbian people.In this way, in epic poems, a historical event was placed in a conceptual framework made up of, sometimes contradictory, Christian and mythical-magical elements. In this paper, we will use a comparative analysis to show how this was reflected in the representation of the phenomenon of death, which is an indispensable part of every narrative about the battle of Kosovo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note sheds new light on Horace's translation of the opening of the Iliad at Odes 1.6. It is frequently noted that Horace's parodic translation turns Achilles' epic wrath into a bathetic "feeling of annoyance" (stomachus). Yet this note argues that Horace is indebted here also to Odyssey Book 17, which already included a similarly bathetic take on the opening of the Iliad. As Horace refuses to write epic poetry in Odes 1.6, he writes anti-epic poetry that is paradoxically at least as Homeric as any epic poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genre of ehoiai , rooted in the local epic tradition of Boeotia, underwent a process of development that led to the assignment of a variety of functions to this type of composition. This genre of epic poetry was originally designed to serve an aretalogical rather than genealogical function, but the earliest ehoiai formed the basis for the later unification of this type of narrative material in the Catalogue of Women , acquiring a predominantly genealogical function. Some of them, however, continued to circulate in the local Boeotian tradition as autonomous compositions; among these, the Alcmene Ehoie , in its rhapsodic union with the Aspis , lent itself to new uses in a new performance context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The etymology of Greek Phoinikes points towards an Indo-European root, despite other proposed origins cannot be ruled out with absolute certainty. The original meaning of the noun does not seem to have connection either with the Phoenician purple dye or with the colour purple. As regards Phoinikes in Homeric epic poetry, the term seems to indicate Levantines in a broader sense, with no specific connection with those known as “Phoenicians” from the 6th century onwards. Apparently the Sidonians were the only “Phoenician” ethnic group known to Greek ancient epics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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