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The Epic

Epic Spirit

In addition to its strict use, the term epic is often applied to works which differ in many respects form this model, but manifest, suggests critic E.M.W. Tillyard in his study The English Epic and Its Background, the epic spirit in the scale, the scope, and the profound human importance of their subjects; Tillyard suggests these four characteristics of the modern epic: high quality and seriousness, inclusiveness or amplitude, control and exactitude commensurate with exuberance, and an expression of the feelings of a large group of people. Similarly, Brian Wilkie has remarked in Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition, that epics constitute a family, with variable physiognomic similarities, rather than a strictly definable genre. In this broad sense, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Spencer’s Faerie Queene are often called epics, as are works of prose fiction such as Melville’s Moby Dick, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Northrop Frye has described Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as the “chief ironic epic of our time” (Anatomy of Criticism 323). Some critics have even look to the genre of science fiction — in prose and film — for the twentieth century’s continuing sense of the epic spirit.