The dying of the epic

This essay inquires into the nature of the epic. Few dispute that the term has meaning, applying minimally to a genre of verse.(1) To ask for definition is to ask what something is. In the dimension of the epic’s whatness, however, we discover an even more essential whenness, which makes ours a temporal hypothesis. The epic has a time, and that time, we contend, is past. Notwithstanding the long and slow process of the way in which the genre is dying, the epic continues to haunt our conceptions of narrative and of story, and to inflect subsequent genres, so that today, for instance, a Hollywood film might seek to capture a little of its reflected glory.