ABSTRACT
To begin with, the artist novel shares its special place in epic literary art with the novel itself. Epic poetry presupposes the preconscious embeddedness of its sense of life and the whole experience of a people and its culture; it is an art that is born of the unity of individual and community, subjectivity and objectivity, is and ought, reality and form of life. The ego is not yet awakened to the self-awareness of a free personality. It senses itself only as a member of the community and is absorbed in the community’s form of life. “Epic poetry still demands an immediate unity of perception and action, external occurrences and events and internal goals achieved through immanent necessity, a unity, which, in its undifferentiated primordiality, is
only to be found as poetry in the first periods of the life of a nation” (Hegel, Ästhetik III, p. 334). Its content is a stream of events that reflects the life of the whole people, its gods and its heroes; its form is the kind of verse and spoken account that expresses this internal unity and social embeddedness.
