Lucian is an author inextricably connected to prose. In this chapter, I argue that poetry is a crucial and overlooked aspect of his literary identity. After an initial account of the striking presence of poetry in Lucian’s oeuvre and in wider Second Sophistic intellectual production, which operates beneath and beyond statements of disdain and disavowal, I turn to a close examination of three very different pieces of Lucian’s verse writing – from remixed tragic and epic ‘quotations’ in the Menippus and Zeus Tragoedus, to the ghostly new Homeric compositions in the True Histories – and highlight some key features of a Lucianic poetics. I ultimately suggest how this poetics articulates Lucian’s wider approach to the literary tradition, and his perception of his own role in continuing it. Lucian’s new-old verse provides him with a self-constructed mandate to reanimate the genres and conventions of the inherited past, to deflate them, disrupt them, and ultimately repossess them.

Chapter 3 explores the relationship of material and immaterial embodiments of animals in the Bronze Age Aegean, through the lion. Since populations of living lions were not present on Crete, representational embodiments were the basis of people’s physical encounters with the species; hence the peculiarities of these “object-bodies” powerfully contributed to the characterization of the beast. The vast majority of Cretan lion representations occurred in glyptic. Seals (as worn objects) and impressions (as material signifiers of identity) consistently placed the leonine in direct relation to the human, through bodily and sociocultural juxtapositions. Cretans also would have encountered lions in immaterial manifestations, through oral culture. Early Aegean poetic traditions formulated a paralleling of human and lion through similes that was remarkably similar to the paralleling juxtaposition generated between a lion-seal and person. In MBA III–LBA II, after centuries of development in Crete, the lion’s association with glyptic extended to the early Mycenaean mainland. This moment saw intense intra-Aegean exchange, with material, practical and linguistic dimensions. The epic tradition was taking form, including lion similes. Through its various embodiments, the lion was caught up in this interaction, as its Aegean juxtaposition with humans fluidly continued and developed.

With striking consistency Morris’s 1877 epic Sigurd meets the principal criteria of its genre. The poem makes its story the vehicle for conveying culturally definitive lore and values, and imbues its heroic actors with the aim of earning a place in that story. The first paginal opening of the 1898 Kelmscott edition embodies this consistency, in imagery and typography that constitute a bibliographical and prosodic rite of passage inducting the reader into a balance of fullness with order that typifies the whole. This aesthetic-ethical balance is then repeatedly thematized along the poem’s synchronic and diachronic axes: e.g., on one hand panoramic vistas, on the other hand sweeping narrative renditions of cosmology and prophecy; or the pivotal “house” figure, which doubles as doomed architectural structure and as tragically concatenated lineage. Morris’s epic moreover incorporates, among other constituent modes like pastoral and romance, the newly ascendant Victorian genre of domestic fiction, which, after dominating the story with the novel-like marital intrigue and foregrounded subjectivity of book 3, yields across the final book to the epic obsequies of Sigurd and Brynhild and the final conflagration of the royal palace at Gudrun’s implacably vindictive hand.

Colonial-era Mexican poetry presents a complex interweaving of several genres; this chapter explores two of its major forms: epic poetry and lyric poetry. The epic, often understood as a propaganda instrument for colonial interests, is also constitutive of colonial historical narrative, as is illustrated by works by Bernardo de Balbuena, Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Arias de Villalobos and others examined in this chapter. Lyric poetry captured the creative virtuosity of colonial Mexico. While past critique has framed this opus in relation to European sources, more contemporary readings focus instead on its interplay with the literary, political, and societal elements of its environment. This chapter explores the scope of this genre and the challenge that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing practices pose to twenty-first-century readers.

This chapter provides an introduction to mediaeval Latin. After demonstrating the impossibility of providing any sort of meaningful survey of so extensive, varied and underexplored a literary field, I model two different ways of approaching the subject. One is through microhistory, where one looks at texts with certain generic, formal or geographic characteristics in a diachronic fashion from their classical ancestors to their Renaissance progeny always keeping in view contiguous material in other genres and in languages other than Latin. The other is the history of style, where one looks synchronically at texts produced in widely different regions and in different generic categories to obtain a broader vista of the way Latin as a literary language changed over time. One way to do this is to look at mannerism, or deliberate obscurity of style for rhetorical effect, as a persistent feature of Latin literature from late antiquity on, in a dialectic with classicism on the one hand, and biblical simplicity on the other. This leads to a revisionist view of the earliest stages of humanistic poetry in Trecento Italy, as growing organically from pre-existing mediaeval stylistic canons.

Starting with a brief overview of the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access, the chapter then looks at different models of intertextuality, within both oral poetic and textual contexts, and teases out how these shape our understanding(s) of Sappho’s reception of Homer. The nonhierarchical, “avuncular” mode of intertextual interpretation is introduced as one that allows readers to find common ground between poets, rather than focusing exclusively on their latent rivalries.

This chapter explores how the idea of sacrifice was used to render death in war acceptable – the death of enemies as well as of compatriots and allies – and how this public ideal was reconciled with the private sorrow of bereavement and mourning. Drawing on a distinction between sacrificing to (atonement) and sacrificing for (on behalf of the nation), it compares the response to death encouraged by the Church with the more classical ideal of heroic sacrifice promoted by Shaftesbury, by Addison, by the Patriot Bolingbroke and by Richard Glover in his epic poem Leonidas. And it considers how the sacrifice of the hero was brought into relation with the mourning of the bereaved, looking at examples in Glover, in funeral monuments, and in poems by Mark Akenside and William Collins.

This chapter covers major late period works, which are in many ways increasingly more twenty-first century rather than eighteenth or nineteenth century: full of contradictions and energy.

Chapter Eleven presents Romanticism as a nationalist phenomenon. After defining Romantic nationalism, it reviews three intersecting phenomena central not only to European Romanticism but also to nationalism: the linguistic revolution, the spread of idealism, and the rise of historicist dialectics. In each case, the author shows how these Romantic principles spread transnationally across various media, influencing political thought and emerging nationalisms. The wide-ranging chapter addresses France’s revolutionary nationalism, recuperated under the Restoration, and even more importantly the German nationalism that arose in reaction to French hegemony, but also touches on other Northern, Central and Eastern-European nations that have so far received little coverage in the volume, including, among others, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania. Its looks at the influence of philology on folklore, and on other literary genres such as the national epic, the patriotic hymn, and the historical novel, as well as the other arts, including music, architecture, and painting. Leerssen argues that Jacob Grimm and his teacher, the legal scholar Carl von Savigny, played central roles in the development of Romantic nationalism and of the notion of Volksgeist.

Chapter 3 considers the underlying narrative structures of Corippus’ epic and how the poet positions the campaigns of John Troglita in their wider context. The Iohannis surveys the events of circa 530–46 in a series of analeptic ‘flashbacks’. As a succinct verse history of North Africa between the late 520s and 546, these surveys differ wildly from contemporary imperial propaganda. This chapter argues that these accounts must be considered as meaningful responses to the recent past within Byzantine Africa and as functional parts of the Iohannis. It is argued that Corippus’ presentation of these counter-narratives created a space for the interrogation of a complex past which would otherwise have been unavailable to him.

The second part of the chapter looks at the prolepses in the Iohannis, where Corippus’ narrative moves from the narrated time of John’s campaigns to their anticipated resolution and the composition of the epic itself. This teleology is not only explored through many direct references to the coming Roman triumph, but also to the counterfactual ‘futures’ anticipated by the Moors. Corippus’ resolution of these accounts through authorial interjections help to underscore the inevitability of imperial victory while emphasizing the sense of crisis within the historical narrative.

Chapter 1 introduces the Iohannis and sets the book in its intellectual context. It discusses the particular difficulties associated with the epic and the different approaches scholars have adopted to it. It argues that the poem cannot be read as an extended panegyric and suggests that the poet was motivated to address the perceived shortcomings of imperial rule, rather than simply to celebrate recent military victories. The chapter provides a survey of the chapters to follow and closes with a detailed summary of the narrative of the Iohannis itself.

This chapter examines the poems of Juvencus, Prudentius, and Ausonius, not primarily as specimens of a late-antique aesthetics, but as instruments for the propagation of religious knowledge and the consolidation of Christian hegemony through the appropriation of pagan tools of art. The poems will be considered both as vehicles of acculturation and as objects of culture in their own right, expressing and fostering a new sense of moral and political ascendancy. It will be argued that where Juvencus appropriates the hexameter form and tropes and images from classical epic, Prudentius seems to invent new forms with the purpose of superseding classical culture and adapting its imagery to a Christian world-view. In Ausonius, Christian imagery is subliminal, betokening his own certitude that the victory of the church is unassailable; it will be argued that in his crucifixion of Cupid, subliminal use of Christian images hastens the dissolution of the pagan sensibility from within.

This chapter examines the politics of postmodern metafiction. Starting from the widespread view that 1970s postmodernism was “politically abortive” and interested primarily in language games, the chapter sets out to rethink this position. Turning back to the coining of the term “metafiction” by William Gass and considering some major examples of the form (including work by Kurt Vonnegut, among others), the opening half of the chapter introduces the idea that there is a lurking sense of identity politics beneath much canonical metafiction. Tracing lines of continuity with the work of white male modernist authors, the model of metafictional “author gods” is critically examined. The chapter goes on to establish a counter-tradition, making use of the work of bell hooks and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to explore texts that use metafictional devices while resisting any illusion of supra-textual mastery. Samuel R. Delany’s metafictional science fiction epic Dhalgren is posited as the exemplar of this counter-tradition. The chapter makes the case that Delany’s text, overlooked by many scholars of the form, should sit at the center of any discussion of 1970s metafiction. The conclusion includes a brief survey of the implicit politics detectable in some recent examples of metafictional writing.

The poetic mode most often associated with the marvellous is epic: an inherently hybrid form of poetry that combines narration with enactment. In his Discorsi del poema eroico (1587; pub. 1594), Torquato Tasso (1544–95) conveyed his own understanding of meraviglia, which in epic poetry is essential as long as it is tempered, in his view, by verisimile (verisimilitude). This chapter explores the transformation of epic from poem to madrigal to reveal how musical setting recalibrated the representational balance achieved in epic poetry. Following the lead of Giaches de Wert (1535–96) and Luca Marenzio (1553–99), Monteverdi would bring epic poetry in ottava rima – particularly musical settings of Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata (1581) – into the lyric-dominated world of the madrigal book.

This chapter explores the ways in which modern works of Fantasy remake longstanding cultural forms. It modifies John Clute’s notion of taproot texts by focusing on larger-scale modes of meaning-making rather than individual influential works, examining the ways in which Fantasy is deeply informed by myths and legends, epic and romance, folk and fairy tales, and religions. Any one of these could be the subject for a book in itself, so the chapter employs a selective approach, giving a sense of each mode’s larger patterns, exploring how these have been taken up in Fantasy and examining a small selection of case studies. The myths and legends section focuses on how recent Fantasy texts remake the story of Hades and Persephone, considering Anaïs Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, Supergiant’s game Hades and Rachel Smythe’s webtoon Lore Olympus. Other key works discussed include Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and Kelly Link’s ‘Travels with the Snow Queen’.

This chapter aims at the sort of overview that the editors of ANRW then encouraged, and brings together the place of poetry in sophists’ education; an account of the many various poetic genres in which sophists composed, with citation of what we have from the only one of these genres to have survived, epigram; and epigrams on sophists composed by others.

This chapter offers a short sketch of poetic output with special reference to the Roman provinces Achaea and Asia, and with an eye on how far we can differentiate ‘professional’ poets from virtuoso amateurs.