Culture Wars in Epic Poetry

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Melville's Moby Dick, and Walcott's Omeros are epics that feature the clash of civilizations. We look at cultural values and social relations (including race, class, ethnicity, and gender) in Homeric Greece, the early Roman Empire, 19th-century America, and modern-day St. Lucia (a Caribbean island colonized by European empires and populated with African slaves; the island was later liberated). We also explore the literary aspects of epic and examine how each epic imitates and transforms earlier epics.