 | Carl Van Doren - American fiction - 1921 - 334 pages
...were to fit his narratives. Simms never took his art as a mere technical enterprise. He held that " modern romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic," and his heart beat to be another Homer. His seven novels are his epic of the Revolution. Marion, the... | |
 | Norman Foerster - American literature - 1928 - 296 pages
...novels recorded by Royall Tyler. In the preface to The Yemassee (1835) William Gilmore Simms notes that "modern Romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic," but as Mr. Carl Van Doren has suggested, Simms meant by epic not Homer but Froissart.9 "The sudden... | |
 | Dana D. Nelson - American literature - 1994 - 209 pages
...itself overtly to the genre of romance that Simms had described in his 1853 preface to The Yemassee, a "substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic," a genre that "does not confine itself to what is known, or even what is probable" (6). Ironically,... | |
 | Donald E. Pease - Literary Criticism - 1994 - 356 pages
...however, is that the contrast between the novel and the Romance is subordinate to Simms's contention that "the modern Romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic."12 This particular generic transformation — the verse epic into the historical prose romance... | |
 | Robert N. Rosen - Charleston (S.C.) - 1994 - 232 pages
...Walter Scott and his American counterpart, James Fenimore Cooper. The modern Romance." Simms wrote, "is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic." He wrote to vindicate his native soil and described himself as "a genuine Southron, well hated by New... | |
 | Lydia Maria Child - Fiction - 1969 - 468 pages
...Simms, a southern novelist, described this kind of romance in his 1853 preface to The Yemassee as "a substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic," a genre of storytelling that, differently from the novel, "does not confine itself to what is known,... | |
 | Paul C. Jones - Literary Criticism - 2005 - 252 pages
...Simms does indeed parallel the historical romances that he writes to the great epics, claiming that the romance is "the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic" (xxix). He argues: The Romance is of loftier origin than the Novel. . . . The standards of the Romance... | |
 | María DeGuzmán - 409 pages
...position Simms the writer as a kind of poet laureate or imperial epic seer. As the preface proclaims, "The modern Romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic" (xxix). In sharp tonal contrast, a lengthy, ambiguous, and ambivalent prefatory to The Scarlet Letter,... | |
 | Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie, Manfred Engel, Bernard Dieterle - Literary Criticism - 2008 - 772 pages
...realism, an acceptance of society in its present structure« (Frye 1976, 164). Porte cites Simms in 1835: »the modern Romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic« (Porte 1969, 39), and this of course also perfectly fits the criteria of Europe's Romantic-Classical... | |
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modern romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic," and his heart beat to be another Homer. 