ABSTRACT
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an epic mix of personal history, travel writing and political journalism". By invoking the context of neoclassical theories of epic evolved in the first half of the eighteenth century, it is possible to demonstrate just how deep the traditional epic roots of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon go and, simultaneously, what innovations Rebecca West brought to the time-honored form of the epic in her modern, feminist incarnation of it. In the mythical design of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the fate of Serbia is merely an allegory for the fate of Yugoslavia as a whole, which in turn, becomes an allegory for the fate of England and, ultimately for Western civilization at large. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon conforms to transhistoric theories of epic. West's book is a hybrid in more ways than one.
