Introduction: The Epic Imaginary in Eighteenth-Century German Literature -- The Imaginary -- The Epic Imaginary and Literary History -- Epic and Political Poetics -- 1. The Epic Genre and the Question of Legitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Poetics -- Legitimations I: Gottsched -- Legitimations II: Bodmer and Breitinger -- Blankenburg 1774: The Theory of the Novel -- Blankenburg's Literarische Zusätze zu Johann Georg Sulzers Allgemeiner Theorie der Schönen Künste (1796-1798): »Der neuere Held« -- Merck: Epic Naiveté -- Herder: »Genealogie älterer Meister« -- 2. The Epic Prosody of the Sublime Nation: Klopstock's Messias -- The Mimesis of the Epic and Epic Mimesis: Klopstock's Theory of Hexameter as »Darstellung« -- The High Priests of the Nation: Klopstock's Supplementary Epic Community -- Excursus: The Passions of Klopstock and Badiou -- 3. The Politics and Poetics of Epic World Citizenship in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea -- Figures of Character -- The Laws of Epic Poetry -- 4. Wieland's Parodic Humanism -- Wieland's Parodic Humanism: Oberon in Context (Part I) -- »Das Volk,« Cosmopolitanism, and Sovereignty in Wieland's Political Essays -- Irregularity in Wieland's Humanism: Oberon Beyond Parody -- Epilogue: Brentano's Romanzen vom Rosenkranz and the Romantic Epic -- A. W. Schlegel's Anthropology of Poetry: Or, the Birth of Meter out of the Nature of Rhythm -- Philological Legitimacy and the Invention of Romantic Epic -- Romanzen vom Rosenkranz -- Bibliography -- Index of Subjects -- Index of Names.