Epic is the subject matter of both these impressive books: the edited volume presents its historical/diachronic trajectory in its multiple revivals since its Graeco-Roman renditions and the co-authored book deals with the theoretical and ethico-political discussions that have helped delineate a genealogy for our understanding of epic. Crucially, as the authors of Performing Epic or Telling Tales state, contemporary performance of epic, instances of which are insightfully analysed, seems to already be ahead of the theory, bridging the binaries that have informed and polarized aesthetic debates about the relationships between epic and drama since Plato and Aristotle. These two books appear at a time when epic seems to be enjoying a revival both in performance through multiple forms and in literary/cultural theory. Indeed, these two books have already made their mark in our re-evaluation of epic as a form that can express and address contemporary anxieties in a manner that is multi-vocal and intermedial.

The edited volume appeared first as part of a Leverhulme-funded project centred around the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at the University of Oxford which set out to trace the various transformations/revivals/rewritings of the Greek and Roman epics in the longue durée of the reception of the genre. The volume is as impressive in the range of topics covered as in the calibre of the scholars it brings together. We have chapters by scholars who have helped create the critical legacies of classical reception studies (Edith Hall, Lorna Hardwick and the editors themselves), together with scholars across a number of disciplines (David Wiles, Tanya Pollard, Colin Barrow) that trace the ways epic was formally refracted through Shakespearean drama and in early modern French theatre (Wes Williams), covering topics ranging from the relationships between epic and film (Pantelis Michelakis), to the sometimes fraught relationships between epic and dance (Tom Sapsford), to the Homeric adaptations by contemporary poets Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald (Emily Greenwood), and reflections by theatre-makers (Tim Supple). The volume includes no less than thirty-six chapters that attempt a comprehensive genealogy of epic throughout the ages. Significantly, the case studies presented are not solely anglophone (Imogen Choi on the seventeenth-century Spanish stage; Tatiana Faia on Camões, Saramago and the politics of the Lusíads onstage; Patrice Rankine on epic performances in the Americas, to mention some examples). Focusing on a couple of chapters might underline the intricate and creative ways the volume recasts the networks of relationships between orality, textuality and performance. The creative strand of this approach can be seen in Graeme Bird's chapter, ‘Homer as Improviser?’ (pp. 228–49), where he draws on the now canonical work of Parry and Lord and takes that body of work on orality further by examining the relationships between Homeric oral poetry and jazz improvisation. To the already intricate interface between textuality and orality Bird adds music notation as part of his analysis of the role of improvisation, concluding that ‘each of these two genres encompasses compositions that are both traditional and individual’ (p. 249). This dialogue between tradition and innovation is a central concern more generally of reception studies, and Lorna Hardwick in her far-reaching chapter/epilogue, ‘Voices, Bodies, Silences, and Media: Heightened Receptivity in Epic in Performance’ (pp. 558–72), underlines the particular contribution of radio as a ‘laboratory’ of experimentation in epic performance. Here Hardwick usefully reflects on the notion of ‘self-difference’ that she borrows from Maurice Blanchot to underline the creative dimension of classical receptions across media and literary genres as ‘the capacity [of a classic work] to accommodate and sustain change without losing its own identity’, and this particular attribute of epic poetry ‘finds its counterpart in the diverse capacities of the performance modes to which it is adapted and which it, in turn, shapes’ (p. 571). This reciprocal relationship between source and adaptation is an aspect of epic in performance that is stressed throughout this wide-ranging volume. The subsections themselves are indicative of the broader methodological and theoretical entanglements that the project addresses: ‘Defining Terms’; ‘Crossing Genres’; ‘Formal Refractions’; ‘Empire and Politics’; ‘High and Low’. These categories reflect the theoretical thinking that has shaped the volume itself. This thinking is given more space and development in Performing Epic or Telling Tales that acts as its sister volume.

This study, as in the tradition it sets out to revise and revitalize for a new audience/readership, enacts and embodies many of the traits of its subject: it is co-authored; it is heavily citational; it combines case studies from ‘high’ literary forms with popular and oral modes; it uses repetition as a narrative motor; it retells long-standing and canonical ‘truths’ about its subject, while reiterating them critically and injecting them with a politico-ethical urgency that renders its topic current and able to respond to the pressing issues of our moment. As the authors state in their preface, they concentrate on the ‘why’ of what they term ‘the recent epic turn’ (p. v). Importantly, they also focus on the ‘how’, recasting long-standing aesthetic and political debates about epic and its relationships with other narrative and performance genres. Through a series of meticulously charted case studies that range from Titilope Sonuga's and Kae Tempest's poetry to Julie Snyder's podcast Serial (2014) and S-Town (2017), to Suzan-Lori Park's re-echoing of Odysseus in Father Comes Home from the Wars (2014), to an inspired reading of ‘Mortal Man’ from Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) and the work of British hip hop artist Akala, a compelling and articulate argument is developed that subtly undoes some of the critical categories that have come to define epic as formally and politically conservative (orality/textuality, authenticity/technological reproduction, drama/epic, dramatic/post-dramatic, epic/lyric, the raphsode/the story-teller/the actor, to name a few). Along the way and more clearly analysed in the first and final chapters, the book reviews and reassesses the positon of epic in literary and performance theory, offering informed and illuminating readings of the genre from Aristotle to Bakhtin via a lively dialogue with the Hellenism of the German Romantics that ‘proclaimed tragedy as the pinnacle of the arts’ (p. 22). Inevitably in a project of this scope many of these ideas invite more analysis. For example, the provocative and corrective propositions that ‘there is no Platonic theory of narrative’ (p. 23), or that ‘the preponderance of work on orality in the twentieth century pivoted around – or at least took as its starting point – ancient Greece’ (p. 43), are exciting and challenging and will no doubt inspire more theoretical reflection. We get snippets from the more modernist theories of epic – Brecht's epic theatre, Lukács's definition of the novel as ‘epic abandoned by god’ (p. 100), Bakhtin's notion of the monologic nature of epic, and passing references to the ‘carnivalesque’ (pp. 108–10), which chimes well with the ways the study approaches orality and performance. What transpires reading these two books together is the intricate ways they have drawn on classical, renaissance and modernist thinking about epic, reframing this for a contemporary audience/readership in terms of both literary theory and performance practice.

This re-evaluation, and in some ways rehabilitation, of epic has been happening since modernism and Brecht, but also Joyce and Eisenstein, when epic was enlisted as part of both modernism's formal experimentation and its theoretical thinking about engaged art and the ideology of form. What these works show us is that both in its historical dimension and as it appears in contemporary performance, epic has perhaps always been thematically topical and formally experimental, not simply the clumsy, gauche and overbearing big brother of tragedy, almost always cast as the privileged sister in literary and performance theory.

In many ways these studies have provided us with a new template for rethinking epic. Parallel to the work of the APGRD that has given us new and creative ways of conceptualizing the performance archive, these works draw on rich and varied archival material, are theoretically nuanced and astute in a manner that will appeal to scholars across a number of disciplines (Classics, performance studies, comparative literature, literary theory/narratology, cultural politics more broadly), and will no doubt inspire more research in all these fields.