The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

Download or read book The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past written by Anthony Welch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.