In his prodigious Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse –, Herbert F. Tucker excavates a history of the epic in the long nineteenth century in an attempt to correct.
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- Epic Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910
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Oxford University Press, Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader: Tucker The gavel of literary historical judgement has long pounded into us the idea that, after Milton, 'the epic impulse left poetry for the novel'. Britain's Heroic Muse reminds us that such an idea about epic poetry, like others we have about literary history, remains 'too smooth to be true. But Tucker's Epic is more than a curio cabinet of dead literary anachronisms.
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True to his subject, he narrates epic's vicissitudes through the century as though it were a battle landscape, in analogy-rich language with no middle flight, where epic poems can be airlifted in and out of cultural embargoes. Here the many switchbacks between the Enlightenment and modernism are mapped as 'an historical continuum,' which seems daring amid our modernity that decries over-arching or unifying narratives.
Indeed, aware that he writes amid the selfsame cultural valorisation of the fragmentary that had a hand in dislodging the epic from its pre-eminence, Tucker feels compelled, in an introductory chapter, to apologize for the epic scale of his book in advance. Such an apology, stated or implied, is typical of poets who have the cheek to simultaneously acknowledge the current zeitgeist and, at the same moment, keep an eye on the broader picture of their civilization's perceived continual unfolding.
This paradox becomes a key trait of epic throughout the book, which cites late eighteenth century claims that the Iliad succeeds because it paradoxically represents 'those feelings, which are common to every age and country,' and yet also 'the character of the times.
Thus upheavals in science and society in the long nineteenth century in Britain — the rise and fall of Napoleon, revolution and invasion scenarios, inter-class hostilities, trains and telegraphs, electricity and empire, the second law of thermodynamics — all challenged epic poets to stay both current and within the tradition. Blake, Scott, Byron, Tennyson, both Brownings, Eliot, Morris and a host of others manage to pull this off and thus maintain cultural relevance in their time and beyond.
Epic Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910
Yet crucial to its value are the little-known poets who inhabit this book by the score. Yet Tucker is always saying more, and his appraisals of lesser-known works register some lower-lying literary topographies, giving us context better to see or question the canonical summits as such, or generally to comprehend the polyvocal tumult of the literary-historical landscape.
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Blake, for instance, is better understood in the context of the kindred works of his lesserknown contemporaries. Joseph Cottle and Henry Pye choose to re-tell such Georgian era events, and the onset of the Act of Union, through their respective competing epics narrating the year-old events of the life of Alfred the Great. Yet his net is cast so widely, taking in such strangely exotic catches as The Viking: Input the intense, action-filled global that turned Legend--as the intriguing Drenai experience keeps to spread.
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A effective warrior and a feared murderer one of the Drenai, Waylander the Slayer is now a guy hunted by means of his personal people--with a fortune in gold provided as grim present for his homicide. Traitor's Moon Nightrunner, Vol. Seregil and Alec have spent the final years in self-imposed exile, faraway from their followed fatherland, Skala, and the sour stories there. Bialostosky and Lawrence D.
Needham Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, — That his generation could be profoundly moved by Homer meant that some portion of the age to which Homer had originally spoken remained a moving ingredient within their modernity. In an age that eVectively invented social science, these rather than narrative were the modes deemed likeliest to promote understanding.
As surety for the bond between epic and story, then, our antiquarian rationale appears no worse than its counterpart respecting verse, but not much better.
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A much better rationale does await us, though, around the next bend in literary history after the Enlightenment.