Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910

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.

Table of Contents:
1: The Very Idea: Epic in the Head 2: On Calliope's Jalopy: Epic Rebuilt 1790-1800 3: Under Correction: Epic Conscripted 1800-1805 4: In Expiation: Epic Atonement 1805-1815 5: in Style: Epic Plush 1815-1820 6: To the Ending Doom: Epic Apocalypse 1820-1830 7: In Session: Forensic Epic 1830-1840 8: There and Back: Emigrant Epic 1840-1850 9: On Impulse: Spasmodic Epic 1850-1860 10: In Plight of Troth: Mythological Epidc 1860-1870 11: For All the World: Eclectic Epic 1870-1895 12: At Long Last: Edwardian Epic 1895-1910 Bibliography of Poems Cited Secondary Work Cited

Review :
`Review from previous edition Epic recovers a continuous, prodigious, overshadowed tradition of writing...and this recovery is stunning... Epic reveals the concurrent histories of other 19th-century genres, particularly the novel...Tucker's positively relentless blend of erudition, colloquialism, and cheek makes descriptions of even the most hackneyed epics tough to put down.' Jonathan Farina, The Wordsworth Circle `Review from previous edition True to his subject, [Tucker] 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 ... crucial to its value are the little-known poets who inhabit this book by the score.' Lee Scrivner, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century `Professor Herbert Tucker argues a coherent case in this, his own epic tome...Tucker's deft exposition is so refreshing that one cries for more.' Robert Giddings, Tribune `Tucker's frequently punning, alliterative prose, while it requires close attention, never bogs down in forbidding jargon, and even comes ornamented with - dare one say it? - a sense of humor. Readers will find much to ponder.' The Little Professor `Tucker's study is an immensely learned and comprehensively researched book that is a valuable source for both the average reader and the specialist' Torsten Caeners, Anglistik `astonishing scholarship' Simon Dentish, The Journal of William Morris Studies 2009