Academic literature on the topic 'Restoration; Heroic; Epic'

Aeneas' encounter with Deiphobus forms a critical juncture in Vergil's "Aeneid". In the underworld Aeneas retraces his past to its beginning; so too Vergil's audience returns to its starting point: the fall of Troy. Deiphobus himself is a metonym of Troy, embodying her guilt and punishment. But Aeneas is frustrated in his attempt to reconcile himself to this past. Aeneas attempts the Homeric rites of remembrance-heroic tumulus and epic fama-but these prove to be empty gestures. The aition of Deiphobus' tomb is revealed to have miscarried. Rhoeteum was known as the tomb and shrine of Telamonian Ajax, not Deiphobus, and Octavian's recent restoration of the Rhoetean memorial would have strengthened the already close association between Rhoeteum and Ajax in the mind of Vergil's audience. Vergil exploits Rhoeteum's resonance with Telamonian Ajax and Odysseus, Antony and Octavian, to reflect on the process of constructing national memory, a process of which epic is an integral part. Vergil suggests that one hero's memorial frequently involves the appropriation and effacement of another. In a similar vein, the heroic fama of Deiphobus which Aeneas had heard in Troy is proven false. Deiphobus' narrative of his death is replete with Odyssean allusions which critique both Homeric heroism and Homeric kleos. Evocative allusions to Catullus' laments for his brother suggest eternal elegiac mourning as an alternate generic model for memorial and reconciliation with the past. But Aeneas is denied this option. At the center of the epic, at high noon, on a cosmic crossroads, Aeneas is poised between past and future, between mourning and hope, between Deiphobus and Deiphobe, between epic and elegiac. The Sibyl interrupts and moves Aeneas forward. Aeneas is not purged of his past, but rather denied the opportunity for true reconciliation, which is bestowed not by forgetting but by remembrance.

The decade after the Restoration saw the publication of several important works and collections of verse. Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic Hudibras satirized the civil war conflict, and although Abraham Cowley’s reputation was at its height, he lamented in his Pindaric odes the lack of reward and recognition for his hardships in the service of the royal family in exile. Katherine Philips’s poems were printed without her consent, and she was preparing an authorized edition when she died from smallpox. John Milton published his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1667, divided in 1674 to form twelve books, followed by Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes in 1671.

This book presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English Revolution, by focusing on royalist poets who left royalism behind following the execution of the king. These poets reimagined the traditional language of allegiance, articulating a flexible yet absolute form of sovereignty, applicable to a republic, or even to a Cromwellian monarchy. This sovereignty was artificial, and generated through the poetic imagination. Several chapters chart the poets’ close acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes, offering new readings of the reception and adaptation of Hobbes’s ideas in contemporary poetry. This context yields new insights into well-known poems by Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, and John Dryden. But it also newly opens up major works that have been neglected, including the two original English epics of the Commonwealth period, by William Davenant and Abraham Cowley, along with the early career of Margaret Cavendish, and the plays of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. A final chapter traces how the poets survived the restoration of Stuart monarchy, showing how they continued to apply their ideas in the heroic drama of the 1660s. The book builds on recent work in both literary criticism and the history of political thought, to contextualize the poets within a distinctive strain of absolutism inflected by reason of state, neostoicism, scepticism, and anti-clericalism. It demonstrates a vivid poetic effort to imagine the expanded state delivered by the English Revolution.

This chapter assesses how Durgā replaced Skanda as a symbol of imperialism as she began to represent local goddesses thought to control land, something Skanda could not. Śaiva mythology employed narrative devices and concepts used to integrate Skanda into its fold to incorporate Durgā and to grant her a critical place within the Śaiva pantheon. This period coincided with the end of the Gupta empire, during which other lineages asserted themselves on the political map. The goddess, now a cohesive deity, began to appear as a political metaphor in their propaganda, replacing Skanda. The Cālukya emperors, for example, begin to prioritize her over their other favoured lineage god, Skanda. Assessing Cālukya era inscriptions, early Śaiva and epic sources, and later liturgies and mythologies of Durgā, this chapter shows how Skanda's decline provided a cultural vacuum after the end of the Gupta period that was filled by Durgā. Symbols of imperialism, such as the restoration of Dharma from the destabilizing effects of adharma, once formerly associated with Skanda in his imperial, demon-slaying form, began to be transplanted to the goddess. Among these symbols, her increased association with the protective goddesses called the Mātṛs, who are portrayed in early literature and material remains as Skanda's family members, had a political effect in increasing the relevance of her autumnal worship in combating communal crises. Safeguarding a community from death-giving dangers such as drought, cataclysms, earthquakes and the onslaught of harmful demons involved worshipping Durgā in the centre of the Mātṛs whose apotropaic function was well established in the religious literature of the day. The ritual sequence of the festival of Navarātra began to be dominated by the worship of these goddesses during the sacred days of Mahāṣṭamī and Mahānavamī. The result is that while Durgā's power in her earlier Gupta conception as Nidrā was connected with nature, particularly the sky, rainfall, stars and clouds, it is gradually represented through a more official array of symbols connected with military kingship, many initially imagined with Skanda, when the transition into Śaivism occurs. While under the Guptas she had been a liminal symbol, her entrance into Śaivism marked her gradual elevation into the centre, a transition that was firmly cemented when this transplantation onto the bedrock of Skanda's cultural conception occurred.

The two films O herói [The Hero] (Angola, 2005) and Kangamba (Cuba, 2008) examine the inheritances reconsider the inheritances of Angola’s post-colonial history and Cuba’s most involved internationalist project in Angola from very different perspectives. This article proposes an analysis of how each of the two films cites the revolutionary impulse of the early war years in the context of the post-Cold War confrontation with the global circulation of cultural and economic capital. The popular war epic Kangamba, an example of what historian Rafael Rojas identifies as a post-Cold War restorative impulse that remembers the early years of Cuban revolutionary orthodoxy as stable and purposeful, strikes a discordant contrast with other more critical accounts of the war, which O herói represents through the story of an Angolan ex-soldier, a former prostitute and a presumed orphan struggling to re-integrate into civilian society. Considering the two films together will expose Kangamba’s performance of a defiant gesture toward a contemporary cultural climate increasingly divided in its collective memories of the war while O herói’s engagement with the post-war aesthetics of disillusionment presents effects of war on the human landscape unacknowledged in Kangamba’s nostalgic look back to the height of revolutionary utopian idealism, and suggests that the damage done to the national Angolan fractures and distances it from notions of national or global solidarity.