Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill by Edward Adams (review)

Near the end of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), we watch the assassination of an Arab prince through drone eyes: inside a CIA control room, on a video screen. As functionaries in Virginia count down to impact, our point of view shifts to the desert, where George Clooney confronts the man he’s been trying to warn of the attack. Just as the two make eye contact, everything explodes. Instantly the film cuts back to the control room, where the roaring fireball has become a silent white puff on a monitor, only pixels. Somebody says, “Target destroyed.”

Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill examines self-consciously modern representations of war from the eighteenth century to the present, so it’s no surprise that this important book—awarded the 2013 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award by the International Society for the Study of Narrative—would help us understand Gaghan’s seemingly ultra-contemporary shift between scales. Syriana splits two perspectives with a jumpcut: on the one hand, we have satellite optics and the euphemized violence of military bureaucracy; on the other, individual heroes who experience the face-to-face connections that go by the name “human.” The film’s suggestion is that institutional doublespeak is subsuming authentic human life. For the more analytically precise Edward Adams, the cynical drive to euphemize violence (“target destroyed”) and the fetishization of agency in the form of individual heroes (or Hollywood stars) are two sides of the same coin: both are constitutive features of modernity. Liberal Epic’s central claim, a persuasive one, is that modernity loves heroes just as much as it pretends to hate violence. That is why the genre of epic, focused as it is on single combatants in martial struggles, so vividly illuminates the tensions at the heart of post-Enlightenment thought. For Adams, epic in its original Homeric and Vergilian form shows brute terror and physical harm without recuperating that violence into any universalist system of ethics. By contrast, modern epics tend to “glorif[y] war and violence in the cause of liberty,” working hard to depict warfare in service of humanity (22). We see two results: poetically sanitized violence and a lingering belief that heroic individuals push history forward. “Liberal epic’s basic paradox,” then, consists in its emphasis on single (male) actors who kill, but only to bring peace and justice into the world (235).

Contra György Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1920), therefore, Adams follows Herbert Tucker’s recent Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2008) to show that the rumors of epic’s demise in modernity have been greatly exaggerated. Adams’s big book shares with Tucker’s even bigger one both encyclopedic ambition and what we might be tempted to call heroic erudition. With impressive agility, Adams reads Greek and Latin originals against their French and English translations, which are themselves reworked through the centuries. In fact, Adams’s subtitle “The Victorian Practice of History” shortchanges his book’s scope, which extends beyond both the Victorian era and historical writing as such. Phonebook-thick histories like Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) and William Francis Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula (1828–40) share space with works in other forms, from other historical and national situations—Alexander Pope’s Iliad (1715–20), Walter Scott’s romantic fictions, Thomas Hardy’s long verse drama The Dynasts (1904–08), Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862), and (in the prologue and epilogue) contemporary video games like Halo. All are grouped into the capacious genre Adams names liberal epic, a “coherent, self-conscious, but acknowledged tradition of epic literature” that is simultaneously fascinated with violence and committed to the idea that it might someday become obsolete (2).

To trace this internally conflicted genre Adams works genealogically, showing the ways...