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Charlton Payne The Epic Imaginary (Hardback) Studien Zur Deutschen Literatur. Series: Studien Zur Deutschen Literatur. The present study thus traces how particular eighteenth-century epics explore an originary incompleteness of political power and its narrative legitimations. Title: The Epic Imaginary. Further DetailsTitle: The Epic Imaginary Condition: New Description: This study analyzes how the imagination of the epic genre as legitimately legitimating community also unleashes an ambivalence between telling coherent ‑ and hence legitimating ‑ stories of political community and narrating open-ended stories of contingency that might de-legitimate political power. Manifest in eighteenth-century poetics above all in the disjunction between programmatic definitions of the epic and actual experiments with the genre, this ambivalence can also arise within a single epic over the course of its narrative. The present study thus traces how particular eighteenth-century epics explore an originary incompleteness of political power and its narrative legitimations. The first chapter sketches an overview of how eighteenth-century writers construct an imaginary epic genre that is assigned the task of performing the cultural work of legitimating political communities by narrating their allegedly unifying origins and borders. The subsequent chapters, however, explore how the practice of epic storytelling in works by Klopstock, Goethe, Wieland, and, in an epilogue, Brentano enact the disruptive potential of poetic language and narrative to question the legitimations of imaginary political origins and unities. Author: Charlton Payne EAN: 9783110271942 Format: Hardback Country/Region of Manufacture: DE ISBN-10: 311027194X ISBN: 9783110271942 Language: English Item Height: 230mm Item Length: 155mm Item Weight: 457g Genre: Literary Criticism Subtitle: Political Power and its Legitimations in Eighteenth-Century German Literature Publisher: De Gruyter Release Date: 06/14/2012 Series: Studien Zur Deutschen Literatur Release Year: 2012 Missing Information?Please contact us if any details are missing and where possible we will add the information to our listing.