Transformations of Epic Time and Space: Creating the World's Creation in Kalevala-metric Poetry
Year: 1996
Type: article
Abstract: As a cosmogonic beginning for both epics, The Creation illuminates the respective mythological structures at work in its oral and literate renderings. In the present paper these transformations are going to be assessed by analyzing generic intertextuality, reported speech, and spatial description in Kalevala-metric epics. These factors seem to suspend narrative progression by describing, motivating, and expanding on themes, and they are often trivialized in narratological models and hierarchies of textual organization. Variable and subordinate to the narrative mainstream as they may be, however, they never remain epiphenomenal. They show that the epic, despite its textual, mythopoetic, and historical authority, is profoundly contextualized discourse emerging from a definite "now," "here," and ego.
Author: Lotte Tarkka
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2184140873