The Epic Imaginary —— Political Power and its Legitimations in Eighteenth-Century German Literature

----- 史诗虚构：十八世纪德国文学的政治权力和权力的合法化

ISBN: 9783110271942 出版年：2012 页码：224 Payne, Charlton De Gruyter

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.