Redéfinir le holisme épique

At the end of the eighteenth century, philosophers started considering the history of literature as a linear progress towards a critical representation of society. Within this view, the epic genre was relegated to the past and thought to be out of date, even dead, since it was supposed to be the pure expression of the state of affairs in a period known as being holistic—when the mind was incapable of any critical approach of reality but was wholly engrossed in it. This article takes the idea that the epic is fundamentally linked to holism seriously, but offers a new interpretation of what this may mean and examines the consequences of such a definition for the history of the genre