If we go by editions of the Annales, Ennius included a series of striking self-references in his epic. These lines’ nature, number (or rate of survival), and their proximity to self-referential comments made by prose historians make them extraordinary in the context of epic. Thus, they shape our sense of the ambitions the Annales housed and the sorts of generic experimentation its author was prepared to engage in. Ennius’ reference to his advanced age, unparalleled in the epic tradition as we know it, is securely attested for one of the later books of the epic. But often, Ennian self-referential lines are not attributed to a specific work by their sources. Like other lines now conventionally assigned to the Annales, these lines could plausibly have originated in a different Ennian work. In particular, the Saturae present themselves as the most likely candidate. This chapter explores the range of possibilities allowable for Ennian self-references beyond the Annales and sketches the difference that reading this subset of lines in non-epic Ennian contexts would make.

This methodological introduction outlines definitions of both the modernist epic and of nostalgia. In particular, it introduces the concept of “archaeological nostalgia,” the longing for the past of a place one already inhabits. This new categorization of nostalgia proves key to understanding the emotion’s role in modernist poetics. Existing scholarly debates surrounding the nature of nostalgia are also surveyed to demonstrate its political significance, and a “weak theory” of modernist epic as a capacious genre is offered.

This chapter considers James Joyce’s paradigmatic modernist epic, Ulysses (1922), reading its meticulous reconstruction of 1904 Dublin as a nostalgic return to the author’s homeland and childhood. While scholars have recently recognized the role of nostalgia in Joyce’s work, they have overlooked its significance to the form and content of Ulysses. The text privileges personal experience of a place and culture over linear ideas of national heritage; in so doing, it disrupts xenophobic accounts of Irish identity founded on racial purity. Its juxtaposition of everyday experience with ancient epic sidesteps an exclusionary idea of heritage while retaining the literary resonance of mythic parallels. In other words, it rejects an unhealthy obsession with the past through its use of nostalgia.

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

Rather than view nineteenth-century Australian poetry as simply imitative of British models, this chapter examines how such poetry explored aspects of time and space in distinctive ways as well as from alternative perspectives. It considers how Charles Harpur conceptualised shifts in temporal scale, how Caroline Leakey questioned positioning and precedence, and how Eliza Dunlop engaged with the idea of distance that extended to aspects of the human condition more generally. It also analyses how writers such as Mary Bailey, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall and R. H. Horne (who lived in Australia for a substantial period) reconfigured classical and English literary traditions through antipodal positions that raised questions around heritage and history. The chapter then discusses women’s navigation of delimiting conventions of authorship. Lastly, the chapter considers how nineteenth-century Australian poetry started to voice nation in an embryonic form.

This chapter considers the empire- and nation-building capacities of the long poem in the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, including epics by R. H. Horne, Will X. Redman and Rex Ingamells. It then analyses revisions of the epic in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including examples that undo settler monumentality, explore other cultural narratives or make use of other media such as film. It discusses the popularity of the verse novel, observing its beginnings in the World War I writing of C. J. Dennis. It considers the renaissance of the verse novel in the late twentieth century, examining how its cross-genre form was often able to accommodate transgressive desires. The rising popularity of young adult verse novels is also detailed. The chapter traces the emergence of non-fiction long poetry, viewing it through the sub-categories of documentary, history and biography. It then discusses Indigenous long poems and recent experimental long poems, including ones that explore visual, conceptual and digital possibilities.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

This chapter addresses the relationship between Shelley’s epic theory and practice with reference notably to Laon and Cythna and “A Defence of Poetry”, as well as Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound. The essay shows how Laon and Cythna breaks with epic tradition – and exceeds Shelley’s own theoretical account of the genre – in finding creative solutions to the problem of how to link past, present, and future, as well as the local and the universal, without didacticism or what Shelley in the ‘Defence’ calls the ‘gross’ sense of prophecy: a foretelling of the future. I contend that Shelley’s epic poetry does not seek to recuperate past moments of social coherence to guide and unify the present or predict the future so much as to leave space for not knowing what will come. Shelley’s experimental epics regard a hopeful uncertainty as, paradoxically, the only certain means of reform.

This chapter provides a short history of folklore collection and an overview of the genres privileged by Russian folklorists. In the early 1800s, folklorists began writing down, editing, and publishing creative oral performance, primarily that of peasants, because it was thought that these performances reflected ancient traditions that had been passed down for centuries. In the course of transforming oral culture into print collections, genres were identified and codified. The epic (bylina) and the fairytale (skazka) were among the genres most prioritised. Their particular formal features served to anchor a diverse genre system that included historical songs, religious verses, legends, and mythological stories. The chapter identifies characteristic events and stock characters, as well as features of style, structure, and performance typical of these genres of narrative folklore. It concludes by commenting on the reciprocal relationship between folklore and literature.

The introductory chapter to this study of Propertius 4 as a collection composed in the wake of Virgil’s death begins by highlighting some of the more obvious ways in which the elegist advertises his allusive engagement with the Eclogues, Georgics and, in particular, the Aeneid, and how the troping of this engagement as hospitality suggests a relationship that might be cooperative or antagonistic. From there it looks back to the only two Propertian elegies in which the name Vergilius features – 1.8 (ostensibly referring to the Pleiades constellation but, it is argued, punningly invoking the poet) and 2.34 (in a review of Virgil’s career to date), each constructing a relationship between elegiac and epic poetics that, as later chapters show, will be revisited in Book 4. After these preliminary case-studies the Introduction presents a history of approaches to poetic memory by way of a survey of the scholarly responses mobilized by Propertius 4 as a Virgilianizing collection. These approaches are then tested in the laboratory of elegy 4.9, a Virgilio-Propertian diptych on Hercules which, it is argued, is programmatic for allusion and intertextuality as enacted in this collection.

Lucian is an author inextricably connected to prose. In this chapter, I argue that poetry is a crucial and overlooked aspect of his literary identity. After an initial account of the striking presence of poetry in Lucian’s oeuvre and in wider Second Sophistic intellectual production, which operates beneath and beyond statements of disdain and disavowal, I turn to a close examination of three very different pieces of Lucian’s verse writing – from remixed tragic and epic ‘quotations’ in the Menippus and Zeus Tragoedus, to the ghostly new Homeric compositions in the True Histories – and highlight some key features of a Lucianic poetics. I ultimately suggest how this poetics articulates Lucian’s wider approach to the literary tradition, and his perception of his own role in continuing it. Lucian’s new-old verse provides him with a self-constructed mandate to reanimate the genres and conventions of the inherited past, to deflate them, disrupt them, and ultimately repossess them.

How much continuity was there in the allusive practices of the ancient world? This chapter explores this question here by considering the early Greek precedent for the so-called ‘Alexandrian footnote’, a device often regarded as one of the most learned and bookish in a Roman poet’s allusive arsenal. Ever since Stephen Hinds opened his foundational Allusion and Intertext with this device, it has been considered the preserve of Hellenistic and Roman scholar-poets. This chapter, however, argues that we should back-date the phenomenon all the way to the archaic age. By considering a range of illustrative examples from epic (Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod), lyric (Sappho, Pindar, Simonides), and tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides, Theodectes), it demonstrates that the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.