Jacint Verdaguer, Andrejs Pumpurs and Petar Petrović Njegos: Three Moments in the Romantic National Epic of 19th-Century Europe

Abstract

In the course of the 19th century, from one extreme to another, literary manifestations of nationalism have shown up in several different genres, and meaningfully in the epic genre, which is perceived, according to the Western literary canon, with its beginning in the Greek epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as a primary expression of the cosmogonic myths of an ethnic group in search of the national identity.

This paper, through the analysis of the works of three major European poets, the Catalan Jacint Verdaguer, the Latvian Andrejs Pumpurs, and the Montenegrian Petar Petrovic Njegos, each one of them writing without knowing the other two, tries to state that despite the obvious social, historical, geographic and linguistic differences separating them (which are also the subject of research), there is one common spirit rooted in the Romantic Movement, connecting and providing them with similar motives and topics.