Hacia una teoría de la épica (1650-1800). Aproximaciones para su estudio en Francia, Inglaterra y España

Résumé

The aim of this doctoral thesis is to reconstruct the theoretical-critical panorama produced around the epic genre during the Enlightenment period (c. 1650-1800) in France, England, and Spain. Based on the elaboration of a corpus of poetological texts, this study identifies and analyses the different ideas that accompany the genre throughout the process in which its literary identity, consolidated by the tradition of classicist poetics, opens the way towards new proposals that alter its aesthetic-literary features and that allow its proximity to other new genres in the previous stages of Modernity. The results of the research not only allow to reconstruct the trajectory and decline of the epic genre throughout the eighteenth century in Europe, but also discuss the limits of the definitions of literary theory that have only considered the archaic and mythical Greek epic for their analysis of the genre. In short, this work investigates the theoretical foundations of the progressive disappearance of the epic genre while offering a new reading of its status in a historical period in which it is considered little more than non-existent.