The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic

Susanne  Lindgren Wofford

Published by Stanford University Press 1992

The Choice of Achilles

The Ideology of Figure in the Epic

Susanne Lindgren Wofford

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804780803

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book examines the ways that Classical and Renaissance epic poems often work against their expressed moral and political values. It combines a formal and tropological analysis that stresses difference and disjunction with a political analysis of the epic's figurative economy. It offers an interpretation of three epic poems - Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, and Spencer's Faerie Queene - that focuses on the way these texts make apparent the aesthetic, moral, and political difference that constitutes them, and sketches, in conclusion, two alternative resolutions of such division in Milton's Paradise Lost and Cervantes' Don Quixote, an 'epic' in prose. The book outlines a theory of how and why epic narrative may be said to subvert certain of its constitutive claims while articulating a cultural argument of which it becomes the contradictory paradigm. The author focuses on the aesthetic and ideological work accomplished by poetic figure in these narratives, and understands ideology as a figurative, substitutive system that resembles and uses the system of tropes. She defines the ideological function of tropes in narrative and the often contradictory way in which narratives acknowledge and seek to efface the transformative functions of ideology. Beginning with what it describes as a dual tendency within the epic simile (toward metaphor in the transformations of ideology; toward metonymy as it maintains a structure of difference), the book defines the politics of the simile in epic narrative and identifies metalepsis as the defining trope of ideology. It demonstrates the political and poetic costs of the structural reliance of allegorical narrative on catachresis and shows how the narrator's use of prosopopoeia to assert political authority reshapes the figurative economy of the epic. The book is particularly innovative in being the first to apply to the epic the set of questions posed by the linking of the theory of rhetoric and the theory of ideology. It argues that historical pressures on a text are often best seen as a dialectic in which ideology shapes poetic process while poetry counters, resists, figures, or generates the tropes of ideology itself.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION: IDEOLOGY AND TROPE IN EPIC ARGUMENT Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. The Ancient Epic
Chapter One. THE POLITICS OF THE SIMILE IN THE ILIAD Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
Chapter Two. THE AENEID: THE POWER OF THE FIGURE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
Chapter Three. THE FIGURATIVE ECONOMY OF THE AENEID Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
PART II. Versions of the Renaissance Epic
ON SECOND PARTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Chapter Four. THE EPISTEMOLOGIES OF ERRANTRY IN THE FAERIE QUEENE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Chapter Five. THE POLITICS OF ALLEGORY IN THE FAERIE QUEENE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295
Chapter Six. THE COMPULSION OF TROPE: TWO PARADIGMS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	372
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	415
WORKS CITED Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	487
INDEX O F CITATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	505
GENERAL INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	507

Language: English
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 496

eBook

Published: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 9780804780803