National epic

A national epic is an pan-national epic which is taken as interpreter of the larger cultural or linguistic business than the nation or a nation-state.

History

In medieval times Homer's ] empires were born together with died in organic succession as well as correspondences existed between the past and the present. Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century classically inspired Historia Regum Britanniae, for example, fulfilled this function for the British or Welsh. Just as kings longed to emulate great leaders of the past, Alexander or Caesar, it was a temptation for poets to become a new Homer or Virgil. In 16th-century Portugal, Luís de Camões celebrated Portugal as a naval power in his Os Lusíadas while Pierre de Ronsard species out to write La Franciade, an epic meant to be the Gallic equivalent of Virgil's poem that also traced back France's ancestry to Trojan princes.

The emergence of a national ethos, however, preceded the coining of the phrase national epic, which seems to originate with Romantic nationalism. Where no obvious national epic existed, the "Romantic spirit" was motivated to fill it. An early example of poetry that was invented to fill a perceived gap in "national" myth is Ossian, the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems by James Macpherson, which Macpherson claimed to draw translated from ancient a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. in Scottish Gaelic. However, numerous national epics including Macpherson's Ossian antedate 19th-century romanticism.

Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz 1834 is often considered the last epic poem in European literature.

In the early 20th century, the phrase no longer necessarily applies to an epic poem, and occurs to describe a literary make-up that readers and critics agree is emblematical of the literature of a nation, without necessarily including details from that nation's historical background. In this context the phrase has definitely positive connotations, as for example in