Epic Romance Homer to Milton [Hardcover]

This study presents a comprehensive view of the epic tradition from Homer through Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and the host of minor writers who helped create the idiom within which these writers worked, to the great achievements of Milton. Detailed studies of individual authors in historical context link to develop a powerful explanation of how and why the epic changed from Homer to Milton.

In this first-rate study, Burrow unites intelligence, clarity, wide reading in criticism, originality in viewing parallel situations exemplifying sympathy or pity, and humor. --Choice

...it is a wonderful book--beautifully written, bold in thought, learned, stimulating, concerned with what is deeply and enduringly human. The history of sympathy that it relates rewrites the history of epic romance, and it succeeds not only in sympathetically joining opposed generic terms, but also in bridging generations of readers and writers. --International Journal of the Classical Tradition