Jo Ann Cavallo, whose scholarship on Italian Renaissance romance epic traditions and their fascinating performance afterlives in, for instance, puppetry, helms this collection of twenty-eight essays, organized into seven topic-driven parts, laying out ways to teach the genre of world epic. Each essay includes about ten pages of discussion, notes, and works cited. A dozen pages is an unforgiving, but likely necessary, design for a large yet manageable collection, and those essays that stand out have condensed complex material lucidly in this format. A reader feels that the contributors are not just scholars of note, but are also teachers of distinction who have faced a fifty-minute clock in a classroom where an “epic” syllabus is being discussed.
This volume adds to the MLA’s series Options for Teaching which, from its inception, has provided useful strategies to help us design and teach classes for non-specialist high school and undergraduate students. Only Zachery Hamby’s “Epic Engagement: Giving Ancient Stories New Life in the Secondary School Classroom” centers exclusively on the secondary school classroom, and Hamby is also the one to state and to address the problem that “ancient”—that is, something well before George R. R. Martin built Westeros—does not naturally connect with “engaging” for students (295)—regardless of educational level. Hamby’s tactics find channels of connection between the ancient and what just dropped. Other versions of the verve, confidence, and commitment of Hamby’s procedures run through all the essays here.
Options for Teaching now numbers more than sixty volumes, many of which with top-notch editors who have guided us toward more responsible ways to teach. Volumes especially relevant for readers of TMR include Geraldine Heng’s 2022 Teaching the Global Middle Ages, a showstopper of a compendium that interrogates “globalization” through early plural forms of interconnectedness, and no less a figure than John Miles Foley, who put together the hefty, unmissable 1998 title Teaching Oral Traditions. In Spring 2026, Teaching the Arthurian Tradition, co-edited by Dorsey Armstrong and Arielle C. McKee, will make a much-anticipated addition to the series. Cavallo herself has edited the well-received 2019 Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic, and her current Teaching World Epics demonstrates that she knows the greater contours of the genre, as well as how to inspire, develop, and support courses that draw upon the “unruly genre” (2) of world epic. “Attempting to engage with the epic genre on a global scale is an undertaking not for the faint of heart,” declares Cavallo in her “Resources” essay (339), but this collection’s hard-working itinerary through many of the remarkable, rich narrative spaces of world epic show how intrepidly she has imagined and completed this needed, noteworthy project.
Nevertheless, to select also means to exclude, and we’ll each have our gripes about what was left out or slighted: López-Ruiz closes her essay with a potentially fascinating comparative treatment of eastern Mediterranean epic, but the Hebrew Bible, which, as she states, “contains no epic poetry” (50), gives us a tip-top example of the “exodus” motif in the book commonly known as, well, Exodus. Surely that’s epic. Literary epics top all other forms of world epics, which one almost forgets to mention because many of these chapters about this class of world epic are just so good: for instance, there’s the impeccable, well-informed discussion by Victoria Turner about how collective identities and fabulated maps were formed in three medieval French epics and continue to influence French national identity; or Christine G. Perkell’s powerful admonition about reading carefully based on some textual clinches, such as how to read the furor of Aeneas especially as he kills Turnus in the twelfth book of Virgil’s Aeneid; or Charles S. Ross’s snappy treatment of power unloosed from morals using Statius’s “bad boys,” Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, and Sturgis’s The Magnificent Seven. Yet, aside from Thomas A. DuBois’s superlative chapter on Finland’s Kalevala, a lucid dart of an essay that does not spare its warm enthusiasm for the Kalevala even as it argues why the text should be on a world epic syllabus, folk epics are poorly represented. Besides the Kalevala, The Tale of the Heike, thought to have had an oral origin and initial transmission, available in modern English translation for decades, and incredibly productive in intermedial versions from medieval Japanese scrolls through nineteenth-century woodcuts to twenty-first-century anime, is discussed in three short complementary pieces in one essay. Some cultures or language groups are reduced to a single example: for South Asian languages, that’s theMahābhārata (though not the Ramayana). The fabulous exploits found in Welsh and Irish epic narratives, full of direful circumstance and mind-boggling characters, don’t claim a spot at all, though an enabling fiction of these world epics is bardic performance and stellar storytelling, a convention retained after they settled into written forms. Yet, to quibble about what Teaching World Epics omits also means to engage with all that’s here, and the fact that Cavallo’s work prompts conversation is no bad thing.
Defining the genre “epic” is a notoriously contentious matter; modifying “epic” with “world” doesn’t make definition, or even description, any easier. In the introduction, Cavallo explains the collection’s understanding of “epic”—a gloriously inclusive one—as well as the plural methodologies that the essayists will use to probe the genre. In a sharp turn of phrase, Cavallo declares that she isn’t going use the word “epic” for “border control” (2), so the times, places, and forms of epic examined here are copious and open-ended. As David Damrosch has argued—and his discussions very much thread through Teaching World Epics—“world epic” is not so much a closed canon of Eurocentric texts, but rather is a mode of reading that entails “...detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” (see, e.g., Damrosch,What is World Literature? 2003, at 281). Here, that “detached engagement” registers as something like the work of translation—meaning, inevitably here, translation into English. Yet, translation as a theoretical topic or as a practical matter (except for locating sources in English) is not discussed thoroughly. Damrosch’s brilliant, if counter-intuitive, idea that world literature “gains in translation” (Damrosch, Op. cit.) is developed only in passing and the conversations that resulted mentioned but briefly. For example, Cavallo brings up the crucial issue of the lexical fields for epic narratives outside of English (1-2), though the paragraph ends too quickly for me. “World Epics in Comparison” by Atefeh Akbari is another example, for she has only the space to mention pedagogical issues like what is “lost” or “incommensurable” when “reading in translation” (328)—disappointingly brief, considering her lauded published scholarly work in multilingualism and translation. And I’d simply like to learn more about how Akbari teaches Emily Apter’s Against World Literature or uses Wendy Belcher’s generative studies of Ethiopian texts (327) in the classroom.
Through-lines that Cavallo’s introduction underscores include discovering the cultural particulars of each epic studied, the themes that are “especially relevant in our contemporary world,” and engaged comparative readings (6). Cavallo rehearses the themes and topics covered in Teaching World Epics accurately and even elegantly in the tough genre of introducing a sizable collection of diverse essays.The table of contents groups the first five parts of the volume “according to time period” (6) and, within each part, essays are ordered “primarily by chronology” (6n6). The partial chronological framing doesn’t seem especially relevant or helpful for a collection that emphasizes comparative readings and universal human issues, even though the reader is helped somewhat by breaking the twenty-eight essays into subcategories. If Damrosch himself raises the question of “Whose world?” as a foundational issue for the emerging field of world literature to engage, then questions also follow about this book’s groups of essays: on whose timeline is the marker “ancient” in Part I located? From whose culture comes the idea of what is “literary” in Part III? Populating the parts of the collection is another of the editor’s thankless tasks, and Cavallo mentions some of the odd categorical cohabitations that have resulted in, e.g., “Part I: Epics from the Ancient World” (6n6). The collection’s fifth section, on the continuing oral transmission of epic, takes its beat from renowned classical philologist Minna Skafte Jensen, who, in an essay on epic performances, locates modern epic traditions in “communities peripheral to the centers of wealth and power and express themselves in languages that do not even have an orthography” (Skafte Jensen, “Performance,” 2005, at 47), from which Cavallo quotes. Section six, with its grab-bag heading “World Epics in Various Contexts,” comprises four of the most exuberant of the collection’s essays. Along with the above-mentioned sketches by Hamby and Akbari, these essays show the teaching of world epic frame-by-frame: Ana Grinberg decisively puts the “active” into a world epic survey course; and Dwight F. Reynolds explores how to present the “hero models” of Middle Eastern literature to a class not just of humanities-, but also of science-concentrators. In “Resources,” the volume’s seventh and final part, Cavallo adds a narrative bibliography of resources, including critical studies, journals, other print and virtual collections, ending with a bibliography of works cited. Notes on the contributors conclude the book. Perhaps it is a nearly unavoidable and digestibly mild paradox that the collection’s methods and supporting material heavily favor North American-style curricula. Resources tilt exclusively toward critical and supplementary titles in English, so that the “world” being addressed by this collection is clearly an anglophonic one.
Jo Ann Cavallo’s Teaching World Epics maintains a collaborative vibe throughout, as if one were at a small, cozy conference with the best of all possible colleagues. As the introduction promises, each of the essays in this collection not only demonstrates the writer’s command of the texts discussed, but also witnesses (times twenty-eight!) a pedagogy of sharing human problems by comparing how world epics from across the planet represent these crucial quandaries. It almost gives one hope that if we keep talking and teaching, as this collection models, we’ll get somewhere as humans, together.