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This book is available in Oxford Scholarship Online - view abstracts and keywords at book and chapter level.

Related Categories

Literary Studies - Twentieth Century Onwards

Literary Studies - Poetry & Poets

Literary Studies - 1800 to 1900

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New in Paperback

Epic

Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910

Herbert F. Tucker

752 pages | 234x156mm

978-0-19-923299-4 | Paperback | 29 November 2012

Also available as: Hardback

Price: £27.50

This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.

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Tells the compelling story of English verse epic after Milton
Follows the fortunes of the 'highest of poetic forms' through the pressures of the nineteenth century
Includes astute readings of great and lesser-known poets
A landmark volume that will set a high standard for the revival of literary history

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 practised without interruption across the long nineteenth century by nearly every prominent Romantic and Victorian poet, and shoals of ambitious poetasters into the bargain. 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 by figuring Britain's self-renewal and the genre's as versions of one another. In passing Herbert Tucker 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 daring experimentation in which circumspect, inventive, worried epoists engaged because the genre and the age alike demanded it.

Readership: Scholars and students of nineteenth-century poetry.

The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.

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Epic

Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910

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