Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (review)

This is a marvellous book, epic in theme and ambition, epic in size, but thoroughly justified in its monumentality.

Written with an insouciant energy of style that belies the weight of its material, the book's object is nothing less than to remake the contours of poetry in the nineteenth century by restoring meaning to the generic category of epic. To achieve this aim it sweeps from the revolutionary moment of the 1790s and the French wars to their recapitulation in Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts at the end of the long nineteenth century, attaining a satisfying symmetry by moving from William Blake's radical historiographical revolutionary epic to "the greatest Edwardian poem" (600). Hardy's epic, despite the dispassionately mordant ironies of its inhuman overviewers, discovers that "faithful registration changes the historical whole" (600). And in his own way Herbert Tucker wants to change history. Despite the triumphalist rhetoric that assumes the novel both absorbed and displaced the obsolete form of epic, he argues, epics persisted in their multitudes right up to the end of the century.

But Tucker aims for more than to show that epic was not under erasure: his larger project is to demonstrate that epic was the primary genre of nineteenth-century modernity because it responded to the macro-history of its culture. Thus he undertakes a massive effort of codification and analysis, which reconfigures remembered and unremembered texts, in order to create this new atlas of epic. He adduces a critical mass of evidence to remake the map and looks at the foothills of epic (and sometimes even below sea level) as well as its peaks. Thus unknown epoists such as Ann Holmes, Elizabeth Hands, Elizabeth Smith, Sara Pike (there were many female writers of epic), Richard Hole, Richard Cumberland, and James Brown are constellated with Blake, Erasmus Darwin, Robert Southey, and Walter Savage Landor in the first chapter, marking the reinvention of epic as a way of addressing the scope of human action and epic itself at a moment of national crisis. In the last chapter, Charles Rathbone Low, Alfred Noyes, and Charles M. Doughty participate in the historico-cultural vision of Victorian progressivism and expanding empire that A. C. Swinburne and Hardy repudiated. Or, to display this extraordinary (but paradoxically coherent) eclecticism further, at midpoint in the book we find Joseph Ritson, George Ellis, W. J. Linton, Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Maginn, Alfred Tennyson, John Fitchett (author of a forty-eight volume poem), Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Alexander Ross, F. W. Faber, and Arthur Hugh Clough at once exploring diaspora to negotiate national origins and troping marriage to confirm that the centre holds.

What does epic mean for Tucker? The radical move of post-enlightenment epic was to replace formal by cultural criteria for epic unity. This anthropological self-consciousness meant that epic could "tell a sponsoring culture its own story" (13). Exploring the origins of collective identity through the heroic register of imagined action to a scale that could comprehend the communal significance of the world-historical stage, epic is consensual and normative in spirit. Because its form is narrative, and because narrative is "the saturated form of generalization as such" (22), it becomes, Tucker later argues, the "nineteenth century's preferred form of organizing whatever it knew" (310). What the century "knew" was a myth of development and process (to exist was to be under development, always already a historical subject). But—and here I extrapolate from the argument—the idea of process is both a confirming and destabilising one. Epic often fractures into discrete narratives, he points out at several places in the book, under the pressure of historical complexity, sundering sequence from consequence. Narrative closure and narrative openness as coexisting possibilities turn history into a problem. Hence the coexistence of conformist, conservative epic and the world sorrow of Blake or Swinburne. But whatever the poles of epic, what holds them in place is the collective, the communal, the...