T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the Erotics of Literary History: Straddling Epic

Epic literature around 1900 was chiefly an archaic form. By 1922, however, the dominant idea of epic had become more about “making it new” than making it old. For Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot it was a polyphonic, fragmentary, encyclopedic genre and in contrast to its reactionary predecessor, an inclusive or cosmopolitan form. This article attempts not so much to smooth over this rift in epic but of problematizing it. Instead of offering a survey of the genre in this period, the focus here is on a single text as a node in which residual and emergent ideas of epic come together: T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph.