1. Epic and Tragedy
Name:Jitendra V. Sumra
Roll No.: 16
Semester : 03
Year : 2012-13
Paper No: 103
Paper Name : Literary Theory & Criticism
Department Of English
Maharaja KrishnkumarSinhji Bhavnagar University
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2. Definition Of Epic
• It is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in
a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic
or quasidivine figure on whose actions depends the
fate of a tribe, a nation ,or [in the instance of John
Milton's Paradise lost] the human race.

3. • There is a standard distinction between traditional and
literary epics.
• “Traditional Epic” also called “Falk Epics” or
“primary epics”
• Were written versions of what had originally been
oral poems about a tribal or national hero during a
warlike age.
• Among these are the “Iliad” and Odyssey that Greeks
ascribed to Homer ; the Anglo-Saxon “Beowulf”,

4. • The French Chanson De Roland and The Spanish poem a
Del Cid in the twelfth century ; and the thirtieth century
German epic Nibelungenlied.
• “Literary Epics” Were composed by individual poetic
craftsmen in deliberate imitation of the traditional form.
• The Epic was ranked by Aristotle as second only to
tragedy and by many Renaissance critics as the highest of
all genres.

5. • The literary Epic is certainly the most ambitions of
poetic enterprises making immense demands on a
poets knowledge invention and skill to sustain the
scope grammar and authority of a poem that tends to
encompass the world of its day and a large portion of
its learning.

6. Characteristic of Epic
• 1]. The hero is a figure of great national or even
cosmic importance. Like , In the paradise Lost, Adam
and Eve are the progenitors of the entire human
race, or if we regard Christ as the Protagonist, he is
both God and man.

7. • 2]. The setting of the poem is ample in scale and may
be worldwide or even larger. Like, The scope of
Paradise Lost is the entire universe , for it takes place
in Heaven, on earth and in the cosmic space between
• The action involves extraordinary deeds in
battle, such as, in Paradise Lost includes the revolt in
heaven by the rebel angels against God.

8. • 4]. In these great actions the Gods and other supernatural
beings take an interest or an active part the Olympian
Gods in Homer and Jehovah, Christ and the angels in
Paradise Lost.
• Epic poem is a ceremonial performance and is narrated in
a ceremonial style which is deliberately distance from
ordinary speech and proportional to the grandeur and
formality of heroic subject and architecture.

9. • Other Examples of Epic ;

10. Tragedy
• Tragedy means a serious accident ,crime, or natural
catastrophe , a sad events, a play dealing with tragic
events and with an unhappy ending.
• Definition by Aristotle:
• The imitation of an that is serious and also, as having
magnitude, complete in itself, in the medium of poetic
language and in the manner of dramatic rather than of
narrative presentation, involving, Incidents arousing pity
and fear, wherewith accomplish the catharsis of such
emotions.

11. • Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the
undeniable, though remarkable, fact many tragic
representations of suffering and defeat leave an
audience felling not depressed, but relieved, or even
exalted.
• In the second place, Aristotle was this distinctive
effect on the reader which he calls “the pleasure of
Pity and fear”.

12. • Accordingly Aristotle says that the tragic hero will must
reflectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither
thoroughly good or thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and
also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is “ Better
than we are”, than ordinary moral worth.
•
• Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from
happiness to mystery because of his mistaken choice of an
action, to which he is led by his Hamartia- His error, or
mistake of judgment.

13. • The tragic hero , like Oedipus in Sophocles Oedipus
the king, moves us not an evil man, his misfortune is
greater than he deserves, but he moves us also to fear
, because we recognize similar possibilities or error in
our own lesser and fallible selves.

14. Types of Tragedy
• 1]. Medieval tragedy,
• 2]. Senecan tragedy,
• 3]. Revenge tragedy,
• 4]. Domestic tragedy.

15. Medieval Tragedy
• Medieval Tragedies are simply the story whether
deservedly or not , is brought from prosperity to
wretchedness by an unpredictable turn of the wheel of
fortune. The short narratives in “The Monk’s Take" of
the contemporary tales are all, in Chaucer's own
term, “Tragedies” of this kind.

16. Senecan Tragedy
• Senecan Tragedy was written to be recited rather than
acted; but to English playwrights, who thought that
these tragedies has been intended for the organized
five-act play with a complex dialogue like the earliest
English example was Thomas Sackville and Thomas
Norton's Gorbodyc.

17. Revenge Tragedy
• This type of play derived from Seneca's favorite material of
murder, revenge, ghost, mutilation, and carnage, but while
Seneca had relegated such matters to long reports of offstage
actions by messengers. Thomas Kyd’s “The Spanish
Tragedy”(1586) established this popular forms. Christopher
Marlowe's “The Jew of Malta” and Shakespeare's early play
“Titus Andronicus” are in this mode.

18. Domestic Tragedy
• Which was written in prose and presented a
protagonist from the middle or lower social ranks
who suffers a commonplace or domestic distance.
George Lillo’s “The London Merchant” or “The
History of George Barnwell (1731). Another example
like Henrik Ibsen’s “A Dolls House”, Arthur Miller’s
“Death of A Salesman”.