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.
| ISBN: | 9780300178869 |
| Publication date: | 27th November 2012 |
| Author: | Anthony Welch |
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 268 pages |
| Series: | Yale Studies in English |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: poetry and poets Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600 Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 |