The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past argues that the fictions of oral performance that Renaissance epic poems inherited from their ancient sources reveal evolving notions of authorship, history, and political authority in the early modern world.Welch's analyses of the ways poets such as Tasso, Ronsard, Spenser, and Milton imagined themselves as pre-literate "singers of tales" revisit a key problem for modern readers of this genre: the deployment of formal and thematic devices from a temporally, culturally, and religiously alien past in order to reckon with political, aesthetic, and confessional challenges in the historical present.Welch's images of oral performance thus work like A. Bartlett Giamatti's gardens, Michael Murrin's military technology, and Tobias Gregory's pagan deities.What is new is that the emphasis on oral performance offers insight into the epic poems' engagement with Renaissance historiography; particularly, how positivist narratives of historical emergence are complicated, on the one hand, by encounters with oral communities in the Americas, Wales, and Ireland and, on the other, by a growing skepticism about the mythic origins of modern political orders

Art · Art history · EPIC · Literature · The Renaissance · Early Modern Spanish Literature · History · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

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