Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910

Synopsis

This book is the first to provide a connected history of epic poetry in Britain between the French Revolution and the First World War. Although epic is widely held to have been shouldered aside by the novel, if not invalidated in advance by modernity, in fact the genre was practiced without interruption across the long nineteenth century by nearly every prominent Romantic and Victorian poet. Poets kept the epic alive by revising its conventions to meet an overlapping series of changing realities: insurgent democracy, Napoleonic war, the rise of class consciousness and repeated reform of the franchise, challenges posed by scientific advance to religious belief and cherished notions of the human, the evolution of a postnationalist and eventually imperialist identity for Britain as the world's superpower. Each of these developments called on nineteenth-century epic to do what the genre had always done: affirm the unity of its sponsoring culture through a large utterance that both acknowledged the distinctive flowering of the modern and affirmed its rootedness in tradition. The best writers answered this call, Herbert Tucker argues, by figuring Britain's self-renewal and the genre's as versions of one another. In passing, he notices scores of mediocre congeners (and worse), so as to show where the challenge of a given decade fell and suggest what lay at stake. The background these lesser works provide throws into relief what the book stresses in extended discussions of several dozen major works: an unbroken history of experi­mentation in which circumspect, inventive, worried epoists engaged because the genre and the age alike demanded it.

Copyright:

2008

Book Details

Book Quality:

Excellent

Book Size:

747 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780199232994

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

Date of Addition:

03/22/21

Copyrighted By:

Herbert F. Tucker

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Poetry, Literature and Fiction, Politics and Government

Submitted By:

Worth Trust

Proofread By:

Worth Trust

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.