This book presents a history of the epic from the classical age to the present day. It deals not just with the well-know epics of antiquity and the Renaissance, but also pursues developments in more recent literature and film. It offers an exploration of the changes that have taken place in the genre from Homer to Hollywood.

While the relationship between place and creative effort has been the focus of pronounced new interest in various disciplines, the contours and co-ordinates of the process by which one informs the other, by which landscape shapes text and vice versa, have yet to be delineated in any systematic fashion. This volume sheds light on that process, investigating the ways in which it is both reciprocal and interstitial: how does text shape our perception of landscape as much as it is shaped by it, and how do we account for the points at which text and landscape intersect? The first part of the...