Best of
Epic

2003

The Red Cotton Fields


Michael D. Strickland - 2003
    The story begins on a Georgia plantation in the year 1850, ending on the gold fields of Australia in the year 1884. This is a story surrounding three southern families (the plantation owners, the plantation overseer’s family, and a Negro slave family) leading up to and including the Civil War. Readers will experience the demise of a southern plantation and follow two of the plantation’s previous occupants (Bart Royal, the white overseer’s son, and Reiner Washington, an escaped slave) as they rise to become two of the richest men in the world. Also, The Red Cotton Fields is a classic love story between the plantation owner’s daughter, Holly Ballaster, and the overseer’s son, Bart Royal. The Red Cotton Fields is destined to become a classic. Read it and you will understand why.

W.C. Fields


James Curtis - 2003
    This is the latest biography of William Claude Dukinfield who can be seen in The Bank Dick and My Little Chickadee.

Kali: Slayer of Illusion


Sarah Caldwell - 2003
    A wide range of vivid illustrations, both traditional and contemporary, showcases the paradoxical and often shocking imagery of Kali, whose outrageous appearance and behavior shatter all social conventions. These intense tales recount Kali's origins as the shadow self of Durga goddess who appears in the world in order to save the terrified gods from the demons Sumbha and Nisumbha. Brandishing weapons of destruction and cackling madly, she annihilates an ever-increasing number of miscreants who try her patience. She comes not only to restore balance within the universe, but also to help humanity cut through the bonds of illusion and attachment.

Sunset of Empire: Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, Volume 3


Abolqasem Ferdowsi - 2003
    This prodigious national epic, composed by the poet Ferdowsi between 980 and 1010, tells the story of ancient Persia, beginning in the mythic time of Creation and continuing forward to the Arab-Islamic invasion. With our third and final volume of stories from the Shahnameh we move from mythology and legend to romanticised history. of Macedon's conquest to the Arab invasion of the seventh century C.E. are reflected in the stirring and poignant narratives of Ferdowsi, the master poet who took on himself the task of preserving his country's great pre-Islamic heritage. We see vast empires rise and fall, the rule of noble kings and cruel tyrants, the fortunes of a people buffeted by contending tides of history. Larger than life individuals are vividly depicted -- the impulsive, pleasure-loving king Bahram Gur, the wise vizier Bozarjmehr, the brave rebel Bahram Chubineh, his loyal defiant sister Gordyeh, and many others -- but we also see many vignettes of everyday life in the villages and towns of ancient Persia, and in this part of the Shahnameh Ferdowsi indulges his talent for sly humour much more than in the earlier tales. end of an era is recorded and Ferdowsi and his characters look with foreboding towards an unstable and fearful future. Breathtaking miniatures from the finest Persian Shahnameh manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of them published here for the first time, heighten the emotional impact of the text.

Inconsistency in Roman Epic: Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and Lucan


James J. O'Hara - 2003
    Building on recent work on both Greek and Roman authors, this book explores the possibility of interpreting inconsistencies in Roman epic. After a chapter surveying Greek background material including Homer, tragedy, Plato and the Alexandrians, five chapters argue that comparative study of the literary use of inconsistencies can shed light on major problems in Catullus' Peleus and Thetis, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Lucan's Bellum Civile. Not all inconsistencies can or should be interpreted thematically, but numerous details in these poems, and some ancient and modern theorists, suggest that we can be better readers if we consider how inconsistencies may be functioning in Greek and Roman texts.

Homeric Responses


Gregory Nagy - 2003
    Yet, millennia after their composition, basic questions remain about them. Who was Homer—a real or an ideal poet? When were the poems composed—at a single point in time, or over centuries of composition and performance? And how were the poems committed to writing? These uncertainties have been known as The Homeric Question, and many scholars, including Gregory Nagy, have sought to solve it. In Homeric Responses, Nagy presents a series of essays that further elaborate his theories regarding the oral composition and evolution of the Homeric epics. Building on his previous work in Homeric Questions and Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond and responding to some of his critics, he examines such issues as the importance of performance and the interaction between audience and poet in shaping the poetry; the role of the rhapsode (the performer of the poems) in the composition and transmission of the poetry; the “irreversible mistakes” and cross-references in the Iliad and Odyssey as evidences of artistic creativity; and the Iliadic description of the shield of Achilles as a pointer to the world outside the poem, the polis of the audience.