An enumeration of generic qualities will define epic less helpfully than will an assessment of its behaviors. Among major literary kinds, epic offers the most long-standing and globally distributed evidence of the human habit of thinking by means of narrative. What it cherishes is the common good; what it ponders are the behaviors and values that forward or threaten collective welfare. What it reckons are the stakes of heroic risk that any living culture must hazard in order to prosper, by negotiating core identities with margins and adjusting settled customs to emergent opportunities; and it roots all these in the transmission of a tale that commands perennial attention on their account. Such dialectics underlie epic’s favorite narrative templates, the master plots of strife, quest, and foundation; and they find expression in such conventions as the in medias res opening and suspended closure; the epic invocation, ancestral underworld, superhuman machinery, and encyclopedic simile; the genre’s formal gravitation towards verse artifice and the lexical and syntactic mingling of old with new language. The genre steadfastly highlights the human condition and prospect, defining these along a scale of higher and lower being, along a timeline correlating history with prophecy, and along cultural coordinates where the familiar and the exotic take each other’s measure.
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Epic
Herbert Tucker
Article
Oral Poetry from Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula Part II: Strophic Sung Poetry and Poetry in the Modern South Arabian Languages
Samuel Liebhaber
Alongside the multiline folk qaṣīdah (the topic of “Oral Poetry from Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula Part I: The Qaṣīdah”), multiple genres of strophic sung verse from Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula offer an arena in which social and political concerns are contested at public gatherings and celebrations. Not all such collective verses are political; many address topics of lyric and sentimental content and allow greater latitude for personal expression. A further category of strophic sung poems—in the form of work songs, lullabies, and popular ditties—accompanies daily life. Although these songs originated as oral expressions of intimate sentiment, they increasingly embraced a sophisticated and cosmopolitan tone in from the mid-20th century onwards. Finally, poetry composed in the unwritten Modern South Arabian (MSA) languages of Yemen and Oman offers a counterpoint to poetry from Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula that has been composed in Arabic. Unlike Arabic literary and vernacular poetry, poetry in MSA languages has evolved without reference to a written and literary tradition; consequently, it manifests features that suggest its primary orality. Starting in the early 2000s, MSA-language-speaking poets began to experiment with writing their poetry; this experimentation has led to shifts in form and content as aspects of the written text-concept have taken root in their poetic practice.
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Oral Poetry from Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula Part I: The Qaṣīdah
Samuel Liebhaber
The intellectual discipline of orality and literacy studies has moved beyond a binary approach to entertain the possibility of multiple oralities and literacies. This multisided approach emphasizes the considerable overlap between orality and literacy, centering the notion of transitional literature: practices of “orature” (oral literature) characterized by the interplay of oral composition and writing technologies, extemporized performance, and stable texts. Given the coexistence of vibrant popular poetic traditions with written practices and the text concept in the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen for nearly two millennia, the analysis of those traditions offers new insights into the concept of transitional literatures. The Arabian Peninsula witnessed the first attestations of Arabic poetry: the pre-Islamic qaṣīdahs, which are preserved as written texts yet embody an oral imaginary. From the 8th century ce onward, critical assessment began to favor literary Arabic poetry with its sophisticated, cosmopolitan stylings. Poetry perceived as rural, noncosmopolitan, and oral—while very much a part of the cultural landscape—was disregarded in the critical corpus and remained virtually undocumented until the 20th century. The 20th century witnessed a reassessment of folk poetry and poetic traditions from Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula; folk poetry that had been formerly ignored was documented in Arabic and non-Arabic scholarship. As that scholarship increasingly demonstrates, Arabian and Yemeni rural folk poetry is not the product of a primary oral culture but, rather, incorporates elements of orality and written culture to appeal to different sources of social and political authority.
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Pastoral
Katherine Little
Pastoral refers to any representation of the countryside or life in the countryside that emphasizes its beautiful and pleasurable aspects. Although the term has come to be used broadly to describe paintings, novels, and popular media, it originated and developed in the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome. Poems about shepherds and cowherds, also called bucolic, first appeared in the Idylls of Theocritus (3rd century bce), and these inspired the Roman poet Virgil to write a set of poems called the Eclogues (c. 42–37 bce). Virgil’s ten poems have been immensely influential. Indeed, pastoral’s long and relatively unbroken European history can be traced to the ongoing popularity of the Eclogues. These poems helped establish the defining elements of the mode: shepherds, who spend much of their time in song and dialogue; the topics of love, loss, and singing itself; a leisurely life; and a natural landscape of endless summer. In the Middle Ages, when Virgil’s eclogues were still read but rarely directly imitated, an explicitly Christian version of pastoral developed; this version was based in the shepherds of the Bible, both the literal shepherds who witnessed Jesus’ birth and the figurative shepherds referred to by Jesus or mentioned in the Psalms. In this biblical or ecclesiastical pastoral, authors used shepherds to discuss priestly duties and the state of the church more generally. Pastoral flourished in the Renaissance, when poets brought together Virgilian and Christian traditions, along with topical concerns about court politics and rural controversies, such as enclosure, to invent a new kind of poetry. During and after the Romantic period, pastoral lost its distinctly shepherdly focus and merged with a broader category of nature writing. As one of several possible approaches to nature, pastoral was reduced to its idealizing and nostalgic qualities, and it was often contrasted with more realistic or scientific representations. From the perspective of the longue durée, pastoral is a capacious category that includes many different attitudes toward rural people and rural life, even the realism of labor and exile. Despite this variety, pastoral is recognizable for the feelings it hopes to generate in its readers about rural life: the delight that the senses take in nature, the sadness at the loss of people and places, and the intense crushes of adolescence.
Article
Song
Stephanie Burt and Jenn Lewin
Ideas about song, and actual songs, inform literary works in ways that go back to classical and to biblical antiquity. Set apart from non-musical language, song can indicate proximity to the divine, intense emotion, or distance from the everyday. At least from the early modern period, actual songs compete with idealized songs in a body of lyric poetry where song is sometimes scheme and sometimes trope. Songs and singers in novels can do the work of plot and of character, sometimes isolating songwriter or singer, and sometimes linking them to a milieu beyond what readers are shown. Accounts of song as poetry’s inferior, as its other, or as its unreachable ideal—while historically prominent—do not consider the variety of literary uses in English that songs—historically attested and fictional; popular, vernacular, and “classical”— continue to find.
