The Epic Imaginary

This study analyzes how the imagination of the epic genre as legitimately legitimating community also unleashes an ambivalence between telling coherent ‑ and hence legitimating ‑ stories of political community and narrating open-ended stories of contingency that might de-legitimate political power. Manifest in eighteenth-century poetics above all in the disjunction between programmatic definitions of the epic and actual experiments with the genre, this ambivalence can also arise within a single