The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic.

That epics are about winners and losers is not exactly a counterintuitive proposition and may not seem a likely basis for a fresh take on the tradition, but David Quint's book is full of surprises. Victory and defeat focus a poem's political and historical allegiances quite intensely; they also bring distinctive narrative experiences: "the victors experience history as a coherent, end-directed story told by their own power; the losers experience a contingency that they are powerless to shape to their own ends" (9) - in a specialized but effective sense of the terms, epic and romance. Scrutinizing that nexus with a strong sense of both political and literary history, Quint constructs a vivid picture of how the literary tradition has gone about thinking of politics; you realize with a shock that the longue duree on this subject has never been taken quite so seriously.

The Aeneid, for starters, incorporates both modes: a losers' story in the first half becomes a winners' story in the second, without missing the dark sense in which the Trojans become Greeks to a new version of themselves. Yet Vergil's poem is also a triumphalist celebration of imperial monarchy, and duly finds its antonym (almost) in Lucan's unfinished and perhaps unfinishable Pharsalia; not the least of Quint's novelties is a sharp eye for this poem's Nachwirkung as a counter to Vergil's example for Renaissance poets responding to contemporary experiences of absolutism and colonial expansion. An anti-imperial epic is still something of an oxymoron, and in general Quint argues that a losers' epic can never free itself conceptually from the framework of the winners' story; but there are also cases, notably Ercilla's La Araucana, where he all but loses interest in saying so.

These arguments develop with bracing specificity and learning. If it is refreshing enough to find a discussion of La Araucana, Quint has also read and thought about a versified Historia de la Nueva Mexico, cruder fruit that still tells us something about the orchard. Epic topoi are often innovatively observed, and keep paying off diachronically: attention, for instance, to Cleopatra's flight from Actium on Aeneas' shield as a miniature "romance" episode is almost uncannily rewarded by Renaissance assimilation of that event to the battle of (near by) Lepanto. Quint indeed handles his knowledge with a nice sense of drama. Discussion of a political innuendo in the Lusiadas is suddenly clinched by a quotation from Melville, a distinguished reader with no academic investment to defend, testifying to just the effect Quint has been claiming. A complicated account of Ferrarese politics seems to be generating a pretty speculative parallel to Gerusaleme liberata until Quint cites a Neolatin poem, Ferraria recepta, that gives the parallel clear contemporary expression. Much New Historicism looks improvisational in comparison.

Wofford's longer book on similar matters has less to offer. She makes only general references to extraliterary materials (some pages on giants in Elizabethan festivals a pleasant exception), and keeps her literary focus tightly on the usual suspects: the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Faerie Queene, with parting observations in Paradise Lost and Don Quixote. Discussion is routed through the (I think) misleadingly clinical idiom of classical rhetoric - catachresis and metalepsis are the most consequential diagnoses - and the politics under interrogation is "the politics of the simile," etc. In general Wofford links figurative language to an imperial ideology that bruises a rather sternly defined literal level of action (Aeneas' descent to the underworld, for instance, is wholly figurative); the main line of argument is a connoisseurship of the dissonance between particular figurations and their context. Individual points are perspicuous, but labored and repetitious; the cumulative result is a chore to read.

Gordon Braden UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA