Stand and Wait: Dynamics of Physical Dis/ability in the Greco-Roman Epic Tradition

Abstract

"Stand and Wait" tells a new story about a very old form. It reveals how stigmatized physical alterity—i.e., disability—shaped an epic tradition from archaic Greece to colonial North America. Scholars have long noted the genre’s obsession with corporeality—with excellent bodies poised between vitality and death—but the middle term of irreparable impairment has hardly seemed to matter. By contrast, I argue that disability—multiply understood as an aesthetic, representational, and material phenomenon—is a foundational category of difference throughout heroic verse. Its manipulation proves central to the generic identity and legibility of individual epics—to their bid for inclusion in an authoritative cultural lineage—as well as to the form’s reimagination by poets who admire its greatest practitioners even as they yearn to transcend their verse. For all sorts of aspiring epicists, then, corporal otherness was unavoidable: a problem to be solved and a spur to generic innovation. To start, I outline the formal and thematic reasons why heroic poems since Homer’s and Virgil’s often broach incapacitated figures only to banish them soon afterward: the possibility of impairment, amid the hurly-burly of epic, cannot be ignored, but it can be defused. In the wake of such exile, a literary kind—which thrives by remembering the actions of virtually perfect men, via fit eloquence and mimetically regularized prosody—can continue more confident than before. Four central chapters then clarify the epic contributions of several endlessly debated texts—Ovid’s "Metamorphoses," Spenser’s "Faerie Queene," Milton’s "Paradise Lost," and Phillis Wheatley’s “Little Columbiad”—that flag their fraught relationship to heroic poetry by enacting what I call "crip renovation." That is, they incorporate, and even are shaped by, a greater variety of somatic figures and experiences than is typical for epic, rearranging the genre’s usual interrelations of form, temporality, and heroism to accommodate their entrance. By reimagining the tradition’s development as one of in/access, I offer a new model for literary reception, insist that neither disability nor epic studies should ignore one another, and foreground what this ancient genre can teach us about including othered bodies in a still ableist, twenty-first-century world.