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Lighting Out for the Rough Ground: America's Epic Origins and the Richness of World Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Christopher N. Phillips
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Abstract

This essay argues that epic, far from being a dead genre, ranges readily across formal and geographic boundaries and that the terms America and epic have defined each other from the Renaissance forward. Drawing on a range of case studies from Jamestown to Kentucky, I examine the ways in which epic travels through translation, exile, ethnology, and prophecy. While I focus on the United States and the colonies that would eventually constitute it, I argue that American literature was an international endeavor before it was ever a national one and that the role epic played in that internationalism prefigures and interrogates the Goethean Weltliteratur ideal dominating current discussions regarding world literature. In response to the difficulties that theory creates in discussing the development of both genre and world literature, I advocate a return to the archive to give theoretical arguments a more inductive grounding.

Type
Special Topic: Remapping Genre Coordinated by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 5: Special Topic Remapping Genre , October 2007 , pp. 1499 - 1515
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Modern Language Association of America

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