Epopee

Contents, characteristics and functions

For the linguist Romance Jakobson, the epic poetry, “centered on the third nobody, strongly uses the referential function” of the language - i.e. it paints a world, events (while lyric poetry rather privileges the expression of the emotions of one I, is the first nobody, and that dramatic poetry puts in scene a dialog, where the " dominates; tu"). Between myth and history, the epopee reports the adventures of people or a national character. It frequently includes a dimension marvellous and painted heroic figures, marked by disproportion and the hyperbole. Its contents are mainly warlike (even if the tension can take other forms, like in the case of the Odyssey , account of the efforts of Ulysses to regain his fatherland in spite of the opposition of part of the gods), and the human actions often redouble there a metaphysical conflict, marked by the participation of various supernatural figures.

According to Hegel, which speaks about “ Bible of people”, the epopee has a strong dimension founder. She tells an episode “related to the world in itself total of a nation or one time”, of which she constitutes “the true foundations of the conscience”. It is for this reason that it is held on a “ground open in itself to conflicts between whole nations”.

Evolution

Treated with equality with the tragedy in the Poetic of Aristote, epic poetry constituted one of the most prestigious literary kinds a long time. It includes some of the oldest texts and most important, like the Iliade and the Odyssée of Homère, (the Épopée of Gilgamesh (written 18 centuries before our era), the Énéide of Virgile, the Ramayana and the Indian Mahabharata, or the medieval chansons de geste, and it is often attached to an oral tradition former to the writing.

Historically, of many epopees were indeed transmitted from generation to generation, in oral form, by storytellers, bards, troubadours, itinerant aèdes. They certainly known as or were psalmodiées on a monotonous music, repeated, only certain passages being really sung. Then the kind joined the written literature, either in the form of transcription of the oral texts, or in the form of new works imitating these models.

In Occident, it however became a largely extinct kind from now on. After the Rebirth, the Jerusalem delivered of the Cup or the Paradise lost of Milton knew to perpetuate the tradition of it, but the following generations, in France in particular, failed to produce poems with comparable success, in spite of attempts like Henriade of Voltaire. The modern poems epic which were retained by the literary history are parodies (in the tradition of the Virgile disguised of Scarron or of the Lutrin of Boileau), or of " small épopées" short (like the Legend of the centuries of Victor Hugo). Considered to be monotonous, the epopee was victim after the XVIIIe century of an increasing opposition between poetry and long account, and it was replaced in its functions by the novel, “middle-class epopee modern” according to Hegel.