Encyclopedia of Literary Epics

Thinking of literary epics, most people would call to mind the Iliad and the Odyssey, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, The Divine Comedy and similar titles well‐known to readers worldwide. But this compendium of Jackson’s casts its net much wider than that. In fact, Homer’s epics are not included in this volume because they were epitomised in a companion reference work of Jackson’s, the Encyclopedia of Traditional Epics, published in 1994. In that book she treated as epics all those poems which included history, and confined herself to oral and traditional stories. However, in the work now reviewed she has moved...