Genres & Forms
Epic (literary kind)
The epic is one of the three literary kinds (alongside the lyric and the drama), depicting events as something objective and external to the author: the world of action unfolds in the past tense through a narrator's telling. The term derives from the Greek epos — word, tale. The epic is marked by an extended plot, a system of characters, descriptions of setting, and authorial characterization. Historically it grew from folkloric heroic epic (Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; the Ukrainian dumas and byliny of the Kyiv cycle) and developed into the large prose forms of the novel and the tale. Classic examples of Ukrainian epic include Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneida, and the novels of Panas Myrny (Do the Oxen Low When Mangers Are Full?) and Oles Honchar (The Cathedral).
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Distinction
Two of the three literary kinds, opposite in their mode of grasping the world. The epic is OBJECTIVE: it narrates events that have occurred, depicts the outer world, characters and deeds in their unfolding, with the author largely a detached narrator. The lyric is SUBJECTIVE: it conveys the immediate inner state, feeling and experience of the lyric 'I' in the present moment, event yielding to emotion. The epic recounts the world; the lyric utters the soul.
