Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.)

First Reader

Dr. David Mahan

Second Reader

Dr. Jane Tylus

Abstract

This thesis examines the evolution of the epic tradition through Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Purgatorio, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, arguing that grief functions as the central force through which epic form is continually reshaped across historical and cultural contexts. While epic is often associated with heroic conquest, divine destiny, or national foundation, this project contends that the genre is equally structured by acts of loss, mourning, and departure. In the Aeneid, grief becomes the condition of imperial becoming, as Aeneas’s movement toward Rome depends upon the relinquishment of personal attachments and the transformation of loss into historical action. Dante’s Purgatorio inherits and revises this structure within a Christian framework, where grief becomes integral to spiritual purification and moral transformation, particularly through Virgil’s departure and the pilgrim’s gradual movement beyond classical authority. Morrison’s Beloved radically reconfigures these inherited epic models by confronting the enduring trauma of American slavery, exposing the insufficiency of classical and Christian teleologies for histories that resist redemption or closure. Through fragmented narration, oral storytelling practices, and the figure of Denver, Morrison reimagines the epic not as a movement toward transcendence or conquest, but as an ongoing ethical negotiation with memory, survival, and intergenerational grief. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the Epic persists not through formal continuity alone, but through its repeated attempts to confront what cannot be fully left behind, revealing grief as both the connective tissue of the tradition and the force that continually transforms it.

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