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Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

Cover of 'Epic performances', with the title in blue against a white background and a watercolour illustration.
Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison, and Claire Kenward
2018
About

This volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, analysing lyric, film, dance, and opera from Europe to Asia and the Americas. Drawing on the expertise of specialists from the fields of classical studies, English and comparative literature, modern languages, music, dance, and theatre and performance studies, as well as from practitioners within the creative industries, the volume offers an unprecedented modern and dynamic study of 'epic' content and form across myriad diverse performance arenas. 

Graeme Bird's chapter, 'Homer as Improviser?', is accompanied by a recording of the author's own improvisations which are available on our Performing Epic project page.

Publisher
Oxford University Press
See the volume on the OUP website
  1. Fiona Macintosh, '"Epic" Performances: From Brecht to Homer and Back’ 
  1. Barbara Graziosi, ‘Performing Epic and Reading Homer: An Aristotelean Perspective’ 
  1. Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Epic’ 
  1. Tim Supple, ‘Theatre on an Epic Scale’ 
  1. Tanya Pollard, ‘Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-Century Europe’ 
  1. David Wiles, ‘Epic Acting in Shakespeare's Hamlet’ 
  1. Marchella Ward, '"I am that same wall; the truth is so": Performing a Tale from Ovid’ 
  1. Wes Williams, ‘Monsters and the Question of Inheritance in Early Modern French Theatre’ 
  1. Pantelis Michelakis, ‘The Future of Epic in Cinema: Tropes of Reproduction in Ridley Scott's Prometheus’ 
  1. Georgina Paul, ‘From Epic to Lyric: Alice Oswald's and Barbara Köhler's Refigurings of Homeric Epic’ 
  1. Arabella Stanger, ‘Choreographing Epic: The Ocean as Epic "Timespace" in Homer, Joyce, and Cunningham’ 
  1. Marie-Louise Crawley, ‘Epic Bodies: Filtering the Past and Embodying the Present A Performer's Perspective’ 
  1. Margaret Kean, ‘A Harmless Distemper: Accessing the Classical Underworld in Heywood's The Silver Age’ 
  1. Tom Sapsford, ‘Epic Poetry into Contemporary Choreography: Two Twenty-First Century Dance Adaptations of the Odyssey’ 
  1. Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘Voicing Virgil: Dante Performs the Latin Epic’ 
  1. Graeme Bird, ‘Homer as Improviser?’
  1. Henry Power, '"Now hear this": Text and Performance in Christopher Logue's War Music (1959-2011)’ 
  1. Stephe Harrop, ‘Unfixing Epic: Homeric Orality and Contemporary Performance’ 
  1. Emily Greenwood, ‘Multimodal Twenty-First Century Bards: From Live Performance to Audiobook in the Homeric Adaptations of Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald’ 
  1. Emily Pillinger, ‘Homer "viewed from the corridor": Epic Refracted in Michael Tippett's King Priam’ 
  1. Tatiana Faia, ‘Institutional Receptions: Camões, Saramago, and the Contemporary Politics of The Lusíads on Stage’ 
  1. Tiphaine Karsenti, ‘Achilles in French Tragedy (1563-1680)’ 
  1. Imogen Choi, ‘The Spectacle of Conquest: Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage’ 
  1. Frederick Naerebout, ‘Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic’ 
  1. Deana Rankin, '"Marpesia cautes": Voicing Amazons, England and Ireland, 1640’ 
  1. Stephen Harrison, ‘After the Aeneid: Ascanius in Eighteenth-Century Opera’ 
  1. Patrice Rankine, ‘Epic Performance through Invencão de Orfeu and An Iliad: Two Instantiations of Epic as Embodiment in the Americas’ 
  1. Justine McConnell, ‘Performing Walcott, Performing Homer: Omeros on Stage and Screen’ 
  1. Claire Kenward, '"Of arms and the man": Thersites in Early Modern English Drama’ 
  1. Edith Hall, ‘Classical Epic and the London Fairs, 1697-1734' 
  1. Henry Stead, ‘Classical Epic in Early Musical Theatre: The Case of Kane O'Hara's Midas’ 
  1. Fiona Macintosh, ‘Epic Transposed: The Real and the Hyper-Real during the Revolutionary Period in France’ 
  1. Cécile Dudouyt, ‘Sacrilegious Translation: The Epic Flop of François Ponsard's Ulysse (1852)’ 
  1. Laura Monrós-Gaspar, ‘Epic Cassandras in Performance, 1795-1868' 
  1. Margaret Reynolds, '“Of the rage, sing Goddess": Epic Opera’ 
  1. Rachel Bryant Davies, ‘Fish, Firemen, and Prize Fighters: The Transformation of the Iliad and Aeneid on the London Burlesque Stage’ 
  1. Lorna Hardwick, ‘Epilogue. Voices, Bodies, Silences, and Media: Heightened Receptivity in Epic in Performance’