Epic Long List

The PhD Oral Examination

in the

Epic Field

(Updated February 2018)

Like all such faculty-assembled guide lists, this set of epic titles is neither comprehensive nor uncontroversial.  It is nothing more than a system of veins from which, with due additions and demurrers, the ore of a good exam list may be mined.  Such a good list will attend to historical coverage and to the variant parameters of genre, medium, and function that make this area intellectually challenging.  Even though many epics do come in "books," in this as in other examination areas a viable list should incorporate forty titles.  The student should also append half a dozen titles in secondary scholarship on the epic.

 

Classical

  1. Gilgamesh
  2. Genesis/Exodus
  3. Mahabharata
  4. Homer Iliad; Odyssey
  5. Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica
  6. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
  7. Virgil, Aeneid
  8. Ovid, Metamorphoses
  9. Lucan, Pharsalia
  10. Statius, Thebaid
  11. Prudentius, Psychomachia

Medieval

  1. Beowulf
  2. Song of Roland
  3. Ysengrimus
  4. Lawmon's Brut
  5. Niebelungenlied
  6. Prose Eddas
  7. Dante, Divine Comedy
  8. Chaucer, Knight's Tale
  9. Lydgate, Siege of Thebes

Renaissance

  1. Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered
  2. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso
  3. Camoens, Lusiads
  4. Spenser, Faerie Queen
  5. Shakespeare, Henriad
  6. Fletcher, The Purple Island
  7. Drayton, Polyolbion
  8. Cervantes, Don Quixote
  9. Milton , Paradise Lost

Neo-Classical / 18 th Century

  1. Dryden, MacFlecknoe, Absalom & Achitophel
  2. Blackmore, King Arthur
  3. Pope, The Rape of the Lock; The Dunciad
  4. Voltaire, Henriade
  5. Fielding, Tom Jones
  6. Glover, Leonidas
  7. Willkie, Epigoniad
  8. Macpherson (Ossian), Fingal
  9. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  10. Williams, Peru
  11. Klopstock, Messiah

 

19 th Century

  1. Blake, Vala; Milton ; Jerusalem
  2. Southey, Madoc
  3. Wordsworth, The Prelude; The Excursion
  4. Scott, Marmion
  5. Barlow, The Columbiad
  6. Shelley, Laon & Cythna
  7. Keats, Hyperion; The Fall of Hyperion
  8. Byron, Don Juan
  9. Carlyle, The French Revolution
  10. Longfellow, Hiawatha
  11. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
  12. Tennyson, Idylls of the King
  13. Browning, The Ring and the Book
  14. Eliot, Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda
  15. Morris, Sigurd the Volsung
  16. Melville, Moby-Dick; Clarel
  17. Goethe, Faust
  18. Hugo, La Légende des Siècles
  19. Tolstoy, War and Peace

 

20 th Century

  1. Hardy, The Dynasts
  2. Conrad, Nostromo
  3. Joyce, Ulysses
  4. Eliot, The Waste Land
  5. Pound, Cantos
  6. H. D., Trilogy
  7. Dos Passos , U. S. A.
  8. Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
  9. Olson, Maximus Poems
  10. Zukovsky, A
  11. Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover
  12. Walcott, Omeros

Suggested Secondary Works

Please Choose 6

  1. Fantuzzi, ed., The Greek Epic Cycle and its Reception (2016) 
  2. Hardie, The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid (2014) 
  3. Turner, Epic: Form, Content, and History (2012) 
  4. Phillips, Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction (2012) 
  5. Bates, ed., Cambridge Companion to the Epic (2010) 
  6. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (2008) 
  7. Dentith, Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2006) 
  8. Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, new ed. (2006) 
  9. Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic (2005) 
  10. Auerbach, Mimesis, new ed. (2003) 
  11. Miller, The Epic Hero (2000) 
  12. Beissinger et al., eds., Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World (1999) 
  13. Moretti, Modern Epic (1996) 
  14. Burrow, Epic Romance (1993) 
  15. Quint, Epic and Empire (1993) 
  16. Nuttall, Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel (1992) 
  17. McWilliams, The American Epic (1989) 
  18. Newman, The Classical Epic Tradition (1986) 
  19. Fowler, Kinds of Literature (1982) 
  20. Frye, The Great Code (1982) 
  21. Greene, The Descent from Heaven (1963) 
  22. Lord, The Singer of Tales  (1960) 
  23. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957) 
  24. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) 
  25. Lukács, Theory of the Novel (1915) 
  26. Ker, Epic and Romance (1896)