Explore epic similes in the Iliad. Learn about the meaning of a Homeric simile, understand its purpose, and review examples of epic similes in...
A rhetoric of jump cuts, voice-overs, and tracking shots serves this end neither better nor worse than do similes and epithets. Celluloid classicism works increasingly from a pantheon of Eisenstein. Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock. Godard, Truffaut. Yet, as in the literary tradition, such reflexivity...
Continuing in the epic form, the opening lines of the poem, indeed follow the time-honoured epic tradition of announcing the theme and invoking divine assistance (Ovid). "Metamorphoses'" narrative method involves many of the devices of the epic manner: long extendedsimiles, catalogues, famousheroi...
Many of these beginin medias res, in the middle of the story, and may digress into the past later on in the poem. There are many journeys into the underworld. There are grand battle-scenes punctuated by extended similes, ambitious analogies that stretch the imagination but strive for literar...
Odysseus wanders over the Mediterranean basin (the whole of the world known to the author), and in Book 9 of the Odyssey, he descends into the underworld (as does Virgil’s Aeneas). The scope of Paradise Lost is cosmic, for it takes place on earth, heaven, and in hell. The action ...
His similes are clearly modelled on those of Apollonius and Homer but, unlike theirs, are integrated with the whole poem in virtue of their association with leitmotifs that recur at pivotal moments of the action. 145 See also Galinsky (1996, 229-231), who discusses a number of mythical ...
Milton also employs other elements of a grand style, most notablyepic similes. These explicit comparisons introduced by “like” or “as” proliferate acrossParadise Lost. Milton tends to add one comparison after another, each one protracted. Accordingly, in one long passage in Book 1, Satan’s...