eclectic, and the editors have attempted to represent several
perspectives-feminist, deconstructive, Bakhtinian, Girardian, literary
historical, cultural, rhetoricahn continuity and change in the epic
from Homer through, roughly, modernism. Despite reiterated state-
ments of its death, the epic has not so much persisted through change
as it has changed in order to renew itself and persist. To quote a
recent critic, Mary Louise Pratt, ʻgenres are not essences,ʻ but are
ʻhuman institutions, historical through and throughʻ (1981, 176).
Within this critical diversity, the contributions may be grouped into
three thematic tendencies which cover the esthetic, the sociocultural,
and the intertextual aspects of the genre. Jenny Strauss Clay argues
ingeniously that in book 10 of the Odyssey, Odysseus, using a double
simile, replaces his companions figurally in Ithaca, esthetically
transforming them with poetic language and thereby rivaling Circe's
pharmaceutical and sexual expertise. Allan H. Pasco includes ethical
motifs when he associates the decline of the noble genres-epic and
tragedy-with the crisis in values signaling the approach of the French
Revolution, the novel coming to reflect more accurately the post-
revolutionary sociocultural vocations of nineteenth-century France.
Reed Dasenbrock, in a discussion that infuses the study of intertext
with an analysis of literary ideologies, asserts that Vergilian epic, to
the degree that it praises Augustan political and social ideals, furnishes
the true, eulogistic model for Camdes' epic of Spanish colonialism,
The Lusiads, and, in a strange turn, for Ezra Pound's Cantos, in part
an encomium to Italian fascism.
Other issues, more specifically related to the question of literary
genre, complement these broad thematic concerns. W. R. Johnson
traces an evolution within the epic from a pre-Homeric, linear
narration of events, toward a conscious search for esthetic effect in the
complex and intense poetry of the Iliad, in which the ʻAchilles poetʻ
centers the narrative on a hero. In a similar, evolutionary vein, J. K.
Newman explores the Ovidian and Horatian intertexts to the opening
canto of the Purgatory, contrasting Dante'squasi-lyrical, Callimachean
epicism to the encomiastic verse of the twelfth-century poet Walter of
Chatillon in his Alexandreis. John T. Shawcross also examines the
mechanisms of change which Milton, a practitioner of both brief and
ʻdiffuseʻ epic, exploits to revise the prior models for heroic poetry.
Stephen Miller treats the recent evolution of epic criteria, discussing
their relevance, as nineteenth-century Spanish critics expounded them,
to the modern novel, in particular to Galdos' Episodios Nacionales.

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