Epics as genre

In her pioneering work, Oral Literature in Africa, Finnegan (1970, 110) concludes that epic rarely seems to occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. This statement raised enormous protests and incited Indiana University Press to launch the African Epic Series. Epics are poetic narratives of substantial length on a heroic theme; they are multigeneric (they are composed of smaller generic forms, such as legend, genealogy recitation, songs, and praise-poems) and multifunctional…