Epic, History, and Philosophy in the Renaissance
Several prominent accounts of the end of epic attribute its demise to modernity. A society riven by contradictions cannot make epic poems. The incoherence of modernity baffles the grand aspirations of epic to tell the “tale of the tribe,” to compass an entire world and way of life in a single grand vision. That is one story of the end of epic in Western literature. The rise of natural philosophy, the disenchantment of the world and banishment of God to the gaps left by naturalistic accounts broke up the enchanted world that created epics, leaving in its wake elegiac mourning for the totality epic represented.