In its meticulous re-creation of events that range broadly over space and time, epic literature can only be rivaled by the art of cinematography.Įpic literature utilizes the full range of representational means in the literary arsenal, including portraiture, direct characterization, dialogues and monologues, mimicry, and the description of landscapes, interiors, actions, and gestures such devices make images appear lifelike and create visual and auditory verisimilitude. Scherer’s in Tolstoy’s War and Peace), or he may use descriptive, broad-ranging, or panoramic episodes in telling about protracted intervals of time or events that have taken place elsewhere (for example, Tolstoy’s description of Moscow, left deserted before the arrival of the French). The writer may create scenic episodes, or pictures, capturing a place and a moment in the protagonists’ lives (for example, the evening at A. Gukovskii).Įpic literature has absolute freedom in its use of space and time. The reader’s keen perception is predicated on unflagging attention to the “expressive” sources of the narration-that is, to the storytelling subject, or “figure of the narrator” (a concept elaborated by V. At the same time, the narrator’s voice characterizes not only the object being depicted but also the narrator himself the epic form bears the imprint of the narrator’s manner of speaking, his perception of the world, and his own unique consciousness. The “spirit of the narration” is often “an imponderable, incorporeal and omnipresent” (T. Information is rarely given about the narrator’s life, his relationship to the characters, or the circumstances in which the story is told. In epic narration, the person of the narrator is a particular kind of intermediary between that which is depicted and the listener or reader the narrator is the witness and interpreter of what has taken place. Temporal distance is maintained between the actual speech and the action being depicted the epic poet tells “about an event as about something apart from himself” (Aristotle, Ob iskusstve poezii, Moscow, 1957, p. The function of speech in epic literature is primarily to relate what has taken place at an earlier time. Consequently, the quality of epic literature is determined to a great extent by the quality of the narration. On the whole, however, narration predominates, binding together everything that is depicted in a given work. Epic narration may be self-contained-that is, it may temporarily dispense with direct speech on the part of the characters-or, by letting the characters speak in their own voice, it may become permeated with their spirit it may function as a framework for the protagonists’ spoken utterances or it may, on the contrary, be reduced to a minimum or be temporarily absent. The narrative layer of an epic work is connected in a natural manner to the protagonists’ dialogues and monologues. The narrator (either the author himself or the teller of the tale) relates the events and detailed circumstances as though recalling them from the past, falling back along the way to describe the setting in which the action takes place and the characters’ physical appearance or, occasionally, to express his own thoughts. A specific trait of epic literature, however, is the organizing role played by narration. The characteristic feature of epic literature, as of drama, is the representation of an action unfolding in space and time-the course of events in the lives of the characters. Epic literature includes various genres, such as the folktale ( skazka), traditional account ( predanie), varieties of the heroic epic, epopee, epic poem, novella ( povest’), tale ( rass-kaz), short story ( novella), novel ( roman), and literary sketch ( ocherk). (Russian epos), one of the three classes, or types, into which literature is divided, the others being poetry and drama.
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