The PhD Oral Examination
in the
Epic Field
(Updated February 2018)
Like all such faculty-assembled guide lists, this set of epic titles is neither comprehensive nor uncontroversial. It is nothing more than a system of veins from which, with due additions and demurrers, the ore of a good exam list may be mined. Such a good list will attend to historical coverage and to the variant parameters of genre, medium, and function that make this area intellectually challenging. Even though many epics do come in "books," in this as in other examination areas a viable list should incorporate forty titles. The student should also append half a dozen titles in secondary scholarship on the epic.
Classical
- Gilgamesh
- Genesis/Exodus
- Mahabharata
- Homer Iliad; Odyssey
- Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
- Virgil, Aeneid
- Ovid, Metamorphoses
- Lucan, Pharsalia
- Statius, Thebaid
- Prudentius, Psychomachia
Medieval
- Beowulf
- Song of Roland
- Ysengrimus
- Lawmon's Brut
- Niebelungenlied
- Prose Eddas
- Dante, Divine Comedy
- Chaucer, Knight's Tale
- Lydgate, Siege of Thebes
Renaissance
- Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered
- Ariosto, Orlando Furioso
- Camoens, Lusiads
- Spenser, Faerie Queen
- Shakespeare, Henriad
- Fletcher, The Purple Island
- Drayton, Polyolbion
- Cervantes, Don Quixote
- Milton , Paradise Lost
Neo-Classical / 18 th Century
- Dryden, MacFlecknoe, Absalom & Achitophel
- Blackmore, King Arthur
- Pope, The Rape of the Lock; The Dunciad
- Voltaire, Henriade
- Fielding, Tom Jones
- Glover, Leonidas
- Willkie, Epigoniad
- Macpherson (Ossian), Fingal
- Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- Williams, Peru
- Klopstock, Messiah
19 th Century
- Blake, Vala; Milton ; Jerusalem
- Southey, Madoc
- Wordsworth, The Prelude; The Excursion
- Scott, Marmion
- Barlow, The Columbiad
- Shelley, Laon & Cythna
- Keats, Hyperion; The Fall of Hyperion
- Byron, Don Juan
- Carlyle, The French Revolution
- Longfellow, Hiawatha
- Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
- Tennyson, Idylls of the King
- Browning, The Ring and the Book
- Eliot, Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda
- Morris, Sigurd the Volsung
- Melville, Moby-Dick; Clarel
- Goethe, Faust
- Hugo, La Légende des Siècles
- Tolstoy, War and Peace
20 th Century
- Hardy, The Dynasts
- Conrad, Nostromo
- Joyce, Ulysses
- Eliot, The Waste Land
- Pound, Cantos
- H. D., Trilogy
- Dos Passos , U. S. A.
- Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
- Olson, Maximus Poems
- Zukovsky, A
- Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover
- Walcott, Omeros
Suggested Secondary Works
Please Choose 6
- Auerbach, Mimesis, new ed. (2003)
- Bates, ed., Cambridge Companion to the Epic (2010)
- Beissinger et al., eds., Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World (1999)
- Burrow, Epic Romance (1993)
- Dentith, Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2006)
- Fantuzzi, ed., The Greek Epic Cycle and its Reception (2016)
- Foley, ed., A Companion to Ancient Epic (2005)
- Fowler, Kinds of Literature (1982)
- Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
- -----, The Great Code (1982)
- Greene, The Descent from Heaven (1963)
- Hardie, The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid (2014)
- Ker, Epic and Romance (1896)
- Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost
- Lord, The Singer of Tales
- Lukács, Theory of the Novel (1915)
- McWilliams, The American Epic (1989)
- Miller, The Epic Hero (2000)
- Moretti, Modern Epic (1996)
- Newman, The Classical Epic Tradition (1986)
- Nuttall, Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel (1992)
- Phillips, Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction (2012)
- Quint, Epic and Empire (1993)
- Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, new ed. (2006)
- Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (2008)
- Turner, Epic: Form, Content, and History (2012)