Gallery of the Spirit of the people. On the European Discourse of the 'National Epic' in the 19th Century

The article deals with the national epic as a specific generic constellation that emerges around 1800. Conceived to be the manifestation of a nation's identity - its,spirit' -, the national epic serves as one of the textual cornerstones of contemporary nationalism. The will to,own' an epic, become a compulsion among the European nations. Contemporary genre theories that are debated internationally, help to provide the epic with its exceptional aura, at the same time serving as models for the establishment of such texts. Thus, the nationalist epic must, quite ironically, be conceived as a European phenomenen, resulting from transnational cultural transfer. First, the article sketches some key aspects of contemporary theories of the genre; second, it presents four ways of constituting a national epic outlined by these theories: finding, forging, ordering, and singing, using as examples the French Chanson de Roland, the Bohemian Manuscripts from Koniginhof and Grunberg, the Finnish Kalevala, and Wilhelm Jordan's German Nibelunge.