Epic (literary genre)
Related: fiction - legend - literature - mythology - oral - poetry - tale
Before literacy, stories were set in poems in order to memorize them more easily. [Jul 2006]
Major elements: hero
followed by: Romance (literary genre)
Epic Poetry
The epic is a broadly defined genre of poetry, which retells in a continuous narrative the life and works of a heroic or mythological person or group of persons. In the West, the Iliad, Odyssey and Nibelungenlied; and in the East, the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Shahnama are often cited as examples of the epic genre. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry [Nov 2004]
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