The Epic World

1. A Critical Race Studies Approach: Race and Racecraft in Apollonius’s Argonautica
2. A Postcolonial Studies Approach: From Fanon’s Revolutionary Literature to Glissant’s Relation
3. An Ecocritical Approach: Early Modern English Epic Possibilities
4. An Affect Studies Approach: Reading Non-Normative Masculinities in Homer’s Iliad
5. A Network Approach: Tracking Female Power in Seven Epic Narratives
6. The Epic Bible: Authority and Identity in the Face of Adversity
7. Gilgamesh and Tiamat Abroad: (Mis-)Reading Mesopotamian Epic
8. (Re)Inventing an Epic: Reading the Tamil Cilappatikāram across Time
9. Sri Lanka’s Mahāvaṃsa, the Great Chronicle
10. The “Epic of the Anglo-Saxons”: The Many Cultural Streams of Beowulf
11. Ecological Imperialism in Vergil’s Aeneid
12. Sunjata Fasa and the Oral Epic Tradition of Mali
13. Osiris Reborn: The Arabic Epic of Sīrat Sayf Ibn Dhī Yazan and the Prophetic Königsnovelle
14. From Oghuz Khan to Exodus: Lineage, Heroism, and Migration in Oghuz Turk Tradition
15. A Battle of Equals: Rustam and Isfandiar in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Shāhnāma
16. The “Hindu” Epics? Telling the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Premodern South Asia
17. Trickster as Epic Narrator in the Malay Hikayat Hang Tuah
18. Connecting with Ancestors: “Imported” and Indigenous Epics in Southeast Asia
19. Epic Contestations: What Makes an Epic in Multi-Ethnic China?
20. Whose Epic Is It, Anyway? Gesar and the Myth of the National Epic
21. Ode to Mongolian Heroism: The Oirat Epic Jangar
22. Placation, Memorial, and History in Japan’s The Tale of the Heike and Beyond
23. Guaman Poma’s Epic Letter: A Complex Salvo against Spanish Colonialism in the Andes
24. Human Owls and Political Sorcery in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan
25. An “Epic of Sorts”: Gaspar de Villagrá and His Impossible Epic of the New Mexico
26. Gender Performance and Gendered Warriors in Albanian Epic Poetry
27. Slavic Oral-Traditional Epic in the Ottoman Ecumene
28. Empire and Resistance in South Slavic and Romanian Oral Epic Poetry
29. “It Shall Be Ruled by Swallows”: The Epic of the Zulu King Shaka
30. Lithoko: Continuity, Change, and the Future of South Sotho Praise Poetry
31. “Man Is the Center”: Centripetal Power in the Malagasy Epic Tale of Ibonia
32. In Service of Authenticity: Epic in Central Africa under Colonialism
33. Female Leadership and Nation Building: The West African Epics Yennenga and Sarraounia
34. “The Return of Rome”: Empire, Epic, and Twentieth-Century Italian Imperialism in Africa
35. Empire and Resistance in Kazakh Oral Epic: The Case of Sătbek Batyr
36. Tolstoy’s War and Peace: National Novel-Epic on Page, Stage, and Screen
37. Ecocriticism and Indigenous Anti-Epics of China
38. Anti-Epic as National Epic: Uses and Misuses of Epic in Argentina’s Martín Fierro
39. To Keep the Sky from Falling: The Epic of Indigenous Environmentalism in Brazil
40. An Epic Struggle in Mesoamerican Indigenous Literatures: Recovering Written Forms of Expression
41. The African/American (Heroic) Epic: Lee’s Do the Right Thing as Critique, Comedy, Caution
42. Listening for Epic Sound and Seeing White

Reconceptualizing the epic genre and opening it up to a world of storytelling, The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and violence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional celebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes. The Epic World illustrates global patterns of epic storytelling, such as the durability of stories tied to religious traditions and/or to peoples who have largely "stayed put"; the tendency to reimagine and retell stories in new ways over centuries; and the imbrication of epic storytelling and forms of colonialism and imperialism, especially those perpetuated and glorified by Euro-Americans over the past 500 years, resulting in unspeakable and immeasurable harms to humans, other living beings, and the planet Earth. The Epic World is a go-to volume for anyone interested in epic literature in a global framework. Engaging with powerful stories and ways of knowing beyond those of the predominantly white Global North, this field-shifting volume exposes the false premises of "Western civilization" and "Classics," and brings new questions and perspectives to epic studies.