Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

Simon Dentith's study of nineteenth-century long poems and novels begins by arguing for the historical importance of what the author calls epic primitivism. Pursuing a nuanced and interesting thesis about the nature of epic, historicism, and modernity, Dentith covers much ground as he examines a selection of important writers including Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling. A penultimate chapter treats imperial adventure tales and a coda takes the reconsideration of epic into the twentieth century.

Dentith situates his concerns historically, beginning with the eighteenth-century debate over the nature of Homer, specifically the Wolfian hypothesis that "Homer" represented the culmination of bardic traditions rather than the work of a single poet. Epic primitivism, often accepted implicitly by those on both sides of the debate about F. A. Wolf's views, was, like Wolf's thesis, also a function of historicism. The primitivist view entailed the notion that the primary epics—Homer for Victorian classicists, the Eddas for William Morris—came from a radically different historical world. In the primitivist definition of the genre, "epic becomes the foremost evidence of the historical alterity of the barbaric world; by the same token, it becomes a principal indicator of our own modernity" (1).

Thus, Dentith argues, epic becomes a mirror reflecting the essential difference of modernity, and attempts to write a modern epic inevitably entail pastiche. From Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) to Morris's Sigurd the Volsung (1876), the poet was faced with evidence of an intractable modernity. For Scott, the challenge was to achieve contradictory aims: "to dramatise a moment of historical transition, when the social order or 'manners' which sustained minstrelsy definitively passed away; and to claim the authority of that bardic tradition" (43). Scott's effort to claim the legacy of minstrelsy in the face of its demise is central to Dentith's argument. Like Franco Moretti for the novel, Dentith creates an "atlas" of genre. Dentith argues that the "Highland line" in Scott's work allows Scott to associate epic with the primitive or barbaric/heroic past, represented by the peripheral Highlands, and to associate the novel (and the nineteenth-century poet) with the Lowland world of modernity.

Scott's dilemma evinces at once the paradox of nineteenth-century definitions of modernity and the power of genre. Contra Moretti, Dentith argues that an atlas of epic in the nineteenth century allows one to map the internal tensions within rather than the recuperative power of the Victorian novel. The barbaric or epic past, as many critics of empire have noted, rests on a geographical equivalence: going out in space from the metropolitan center equates to going back in time. The periphery "gets the glamour" as Dentith puts it, and "in many cases, this is the glamour of epic" (125). Here Dentith's work might fruitfully be read against Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism (1997), which he acknowledges but does not examine in detail.

Theorists of the novel may find useful Dentith's argument that "allusion to epic within the form of the novel need not be overwhelmed by the ironies and provisionalities characteristic of 'novelness', but can instead act as the disruptive force which transcends the novelistic bracket that seeks to contain it" (126). The reverse process, Dentith shows, operates in a poem like Aurora Leigh (1857), where the poet's challenge is to achieve the perspective she claims will allow the reader to see modernity in its true (and epic) light; following Mikhail Bakhtin, Dentith argues that Aurora Leigh is "a poem whose alternation between epic and novel can be seen in its intermittent capacity to hold its action at a suitably epic distance," a task made more complex by the gendered entailments of heroic epic (103).

A similar set of entailments dogged the Victorian translators of epic, from F. W. Newman to Arnold. While Scott and Newman attempt in different ways...