Epic (genre)  

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An epic is traditionally a genre of poetry, known as epic poetry. However in modern terms, epic is often extended to other art forms, such as novels, theater and film, where the story is centered on heroic characters, and the action takes place on a grand scale, just as in epic poetry. Epics in this sense are majestic depictions that capture impressive struggles, such as stories of war, adventures, and other efforts of great scope and size over long periods of time. The real life stories of heroic figures have also been referred to as being epic. Examples of notable epics include Ernest Shackleton's exploration adventures in Antarctica, historical novels such as War and Peace.

Literature

Length of the novel and the epic depiction of life

The requirement of length is contested – in English with greater ferocity than in other languages. It rests on the consensus that the novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose, followed by the novella and the short story. The sequence has been unstable: 17th-century critics had handled the romance as the epic length performance and privileged the novel as its short rival.

The question how long a novel has to be – in order to be more than a novella – is of practical importance as most of the literary awards have developed a ranking system in which length is also a criterion of importance. The Booker Prize has thus aroused a serious debate with its 2007 listing of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. Critics immediately stated that McEwan had at best written a novella.

The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that epic length performances try to cope with the "totality of life". The novella is by contrast focused on a point, the short story on a situation whose full dimensions the reader has to grasp in a complex process of interpretation. Snoopy's novel It Was A Dark And Stormy Night which followed the 1965 cartoon in 1971 proves that the requirement of length is actually secondary to the requirement of a certain perspective on life – which Snoopy can easily offer in 214 words:

Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?
The intern frowned.
"Stampede!" the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. He had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.
THE END

The text is shorter than most short stories yet definitely a novel thanks to the author's attempts to risk what Lucáks had seen as the "Great epic's" potential to "give form to the extensive totality of life." The difference between the ancient Homerian epic and the modern novel is, according to Lucáks, that the new genre is the perfect form to reflect the modern individual's experience of the world: "Equilibrium, coherence and unity" had been features of the ancient epic. A "fragmentary nature of the world's structure" is by contrast the typical experience modern novels provide, so Lucáks. Snoopy's novel indicates that this is basically a convention.


Film epics

In the history of cinema, many epic films have been produced and recognized for their scale and drama. For example The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien) was considered by Marc Caro (2003) of the Chicago Tribune as one of the greatest film epics.

Bibliography




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Epic (genre)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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