Intending to move beyond the traditional “trajectory that went from Homer to Milton” (3), this volume aims to highlight “the extraordinary wealth of the world’s epic narrative traditions” while providing “instructors with pedagogical tools and ideas to teach epics in a variety of courses” (13). With twenty-eight contributions from authors with varying expertise in the topic, Teaching World Epics fulfils its function in making this “unruly genre” (3) more accessible for the (typically undergraduate) classroom. This review will provide an overview of the volume, and then comment more closely on two specific chapters.
The label “epic” is defined broadly as “cherished stories relating memorable deeds by heroic characters whose actions have significant consequences for themselves and their larger communities” (1). This is reflected in the coverage of the six sections.
· Epics of the ancient world (Mahabharata, Ramayana, Iliad, Aeneid, Thebaid).
· 10th-15th century epics (Song of Roland, Daurel and Beton, Charlemagne’s Journey to Jerusalem and Constantinople, Poema de mio Cid, Nibelungenlied, Kudrun, The Book of Dede Korkut, The Tale of the Heike, Three Kingdoms).
· 16th-17th century literary epics (Orlando Furioso, Faerie Queene, Os Lusíadas, La Araucana, Historia de la Nueva México, Paradise Lost).
· 16th-19th century oral-derived epics (Popul Wuj, Kalevala, Manas, David of Sassoun).
· Enduring oral traditions (Mwindo, Sun-Jata, The Epic of Askia Mohammed, The Legend of Poṉṉivaḷa Nadu)
· World epics in (broadened) various contexts (Gilgamesh, Sirat Bani Hilal, Shahnameh, Odyssey, Kebra Nagast).
Each chapter can be read either for a brief illumination into the presented epic(s) or for adaptable approaches for other material. Many are designed to be used for a two-week section of a syllabus. The prose is generally readable, though sometimes too much is attempted in the short space allocated. Though global in intention, the focus and tone (and occasional contemporary issue) are frequently of and for a North American context.[1] Post-chapter bibliographies, typically focused on English-language material, often contain affordable translations rather than expensive academic critical editions.[2] Though an index would have been helpful, educators will find much of use.
Having taught the Kyrgyz-language Manas over several semesters (admittedly in Bishkek, not the US), I enjoyed Roberta Micallef demonstrating how it can be placed in an undergraduate course on Turkic epics. She shows how a comparative focus on particular themes can facilitate student analysis of “societal gender norms, expectations, and performances” (231), good leadership, and cross-cultural friendship. Though the chapter is placed in the 16th-19th centuries oral-derived epics section, Micallef selects as her class texts an online translation of extracts from a Soviet-era variant and a recent inexpensive translation “marketed for young readers (five to eighteen years of age)” (231) of the Russian-language post-Soviet version by a playwright. Selecting the (admittedly older and more expensive) academic editions (with the original Kyrgyz and facing English translation) of the nineteenth-century variants would have been more fitting (and accurate) with Micallef’s interest in the “nomadic values and the sociopolitical milieu” (229).[3] The helpful precis that Micallef provides regarding the history of the epic and its increasing association with issues of nation-building, politics, and cultural heritage–a topic which, while fascinating, frequently overshadows both Manas and its presence in a classroom–presents an overview that I hope inspires educators and students to explore further. As a piece to spark ideas, I would have greatly appreciated having Micallef’s chapter when I was first preparing to teach Manas in a classroom.
The final chapter by Atefeh Akbari presents to any prospective instructor the issues of teaching epics. Akbari shares her “World Literature Revisited I,” designed to make “ethical readers” “attuned to gaps in their comprehension” (327). Supported by quotations from her students’ reflections, Akbari shows the preparation, scaffolding, and dedication required to achieve this aim: reflective assignments (culminating in the students creating their own syllabi), additional reading material and contextualization, and the attention to student agency. The course helps students “question and challenge implicit and explicit power structures in the category of world literature” (325). Akbari achieves this by prompting students to reflect upon their study: seeing via comparison of Emily Wilson’s 2018 Odyssey translation “bias and violent sexism” (329) in earlier versions, observing in the sparse available resources for studying the Kebra Nagast “the diminished value that non-canonical and non-Western texts have in the world literary market-place” (330), and noting what is selected and omitted in publications of the Shahnameh tailored to presumed interests of English-language Western readers, “an understanding of the institutional structures of world literature as a discipline” (333). With the course, Akbari’s students, the majority of whom “rarely, if ever” have “read a text’s introduction, let alone a translator’s introduction” (325), help the topic become “infinitely more democratic and less Eurocentric in its proclivities and methodologies” (334). While Akbari’s design runs the risk of paradoxically centralizing the recent Anglophone world (given the weighing towards English language) in her course, and, like much of the volume, focusing heavily on English translations rather than preparing students for engaging with the original source material, nonetheless her syllabus highlights to her students and to her readers the many issues, controversies, and difficulties in approaching such texts.
Teaching World Epics will prompt and assist instructors wishing to carefully engage with any of the texts present. Readers irritated by the broad definition of “epic” and the lack of explicit comment on the impact of placing this genre label on a text or a living tradition will still find much of comparative interest.[4] A second edition would hopefully include epics shared by different nations and ethnicities, comment on the particular (such as the question of individual talent and careers), move away from the frequent "a people, a language, an epic" paradigm, feature more local scholars and voices (and not just their epics), and, for further self-awareness, examine the role of (foreign or local) scholarship upon the text(s) and tradition(s).[5] Such wishes stem from the wide and diverse texts, ideas, and approaches in Teaching World Epics, and other teachers and their students are likely to find their own new ideas for exploration at the start of their adventures.
Notes:
[1] Curiously absent is any chapter on an indigenous North American epic. In the early years of the twentieth century, two students of Franz Boas made transcriptions that should be regarded as comparable to any text or tradition covered in Teaching World Epics: A. L. Kroeber, via his bilingual friend and guide Jack Jones, jotted in English prose a Mohave narrative from Inyo-kutavêre; and John Reed Swanton, using a method of transcribing phonetically and with the assistance of his bilingual assistant (and teacher) Henry Moody, collected long poems in Haida from the poets Skaay and Ghandl. Ojibwa narratives, mentioned fleetingly in the volume, could also have been included in greater depth. Lawrence W. Goss, “Cultural Sovereignty and Native American Hermeneutics in the Interpretation of the Sacred Stories of the Anishinaabe,” Wicazo Sa Review 18 (2003): 127-134, highlights that “[n]ew Wenabozho stories are being created to resist colonialism” (130), among them one featuring the hero Wenabozho fighting off Paul Bunyan’s attempt to cut down woods. Imagine the possibilities of that in a classroom.
[2] Among several translations of Gilgamesh referenced in the volume is Andrew George’s Penguin translation (1999, rev. 2003); there is no mention of his two-volume The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) which, this reviewer can vouch, immediately shows students what scholarship is and how much greater discussion can be using such editions.
[3] Comparing the depictions of Oronghu, if done with care, can vividly address the aspects that Micallef mentions. One wishes for a student edition of the nineteenth-century Birth of Semetey, with its focus on the plight of Manas’s widow, and an accessible text of the “minor epic” with a female protagonist, Zhangyl Myrza.
[4] Narratives concerned with Manas and his descendants have been labelled in other ways in addition to epic in various languages and with various connotations (jomok, qissa, skazka), and the label of “epos” applied by Valikhanov has its own oft-overlooked ideological cultural connotations and assumptions.
[5] Absent from the volume are Edige, Gesar, Jangar, Shono baatar, and cross-cultural hybrid-epics such as Apollon Toroev’s Stalin baatar.
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[Review length: 1347 words • Review posted on February 6, 2025]