Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The epic genre continued to be important in the nineteenth century despite its apparent anachronism.

Simon Dentith (Author)

9780521123570, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 19 November 2009

260 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.39 kg

'In this cogent and clearly written book Simon Dentith gives a convincing account of the part played by epic in nineteenth-century literature and culture, which he shows to have been larger than we might casually assume.' The Journal of William Morris Studies

In the nineteenth century, epic poetry in the Homeric style was widely seen as an ancient and anachronistic genre, yet Victorian authors worked to recreate it for the modern world. Simon Dentith explores the relationship between epic and the evolution of Britain's national identity in the nineteenth century up to the apparent demise of all notions of heroic warfare in the catastrophe of the First World War. Paradoxically, writers found equivalents of the societies which produced Homeric or Northern epics not in Europe, but on the margins of empire and among its subject peoples. Dentith considers the implications of the status of epic for a range of nineteenth-century writers, including Walter Scott, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris and Rudyard Kipling. He also considers the relationship between epic poetry and the novel and discusses late nineteenth-century adventure novels, concluding with a brief survey of epic in the twentieth century.

Introduction
1. Homer, Ossian and modernity
2. Walter Scott and heroic minstrelsy
3. Epic translation and the national ballad metre
4. The matter of Britain and the search for a national epic
5. 'As flat as Fleet Street': Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot on epic and modernity
6. Mapping epic and novel
7. Epic and the imperial theme
8. Kipling, Bard of Empire
9. Epic and the subject peoples of Empire
10. Coda: some Homeric futures
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]