Abstract
By the time we arrive at the nineteenth century, there exists an epic tradition constituted generally by the classical and Renaissance epics, but more particularly emblematised by Milton’s Paradise Lost. The epics of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Romantic age, acknowledge this epic influence in one way or another. But these epics are also implicitly indebted to another tradition, represented more explicitly by Fielding and the Cervantine comic epic tradition, with its interest in matters of selfhood and self-development.
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Notes
Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Introduction, The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970) 13.
Samuel Johnson, ‘Milton’, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905) I, 156.
John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958) I, 170.
William Hayley, An Essay on Epick Poetry, ed. M. Celeste Williamson (1782; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Fascimiles and Reprints, 1968) I, 261–4.
Qtd. in W. Macneile Dixon, English Epic and Heroic Poetry (London: J. M. Dent, 1912) 2.
James Beattie, ‘On Fable and Romance’, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell, and W. Creech, 1783) 573.
Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance and the History of Charoba, Queen of Aegypt (1785; New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930) I, 17.
Donald M. Foerster, The Fortunes of Epic Poetry (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965) 56–82.
See Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965) 30–58; as Byron suggested disdainfully, one could expect ‘an epic from Bob Southey every spring’ Don Juan III, 97.
Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Northrop Frye, ‘Notes for a Commentary on Milton’, The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957) 102.
Wittreich, Angel of the Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975) 5.
Hayley, Life of Milton, ed. Joseph Wittreich (1796; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970) xvii.
Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (1993; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 257–78.
David Riede, ‘Blake’s Milton: On Membership of Church Paul’, Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Tradition, ed. M. Nyquist and M. W. Ferguson (New York: 1988), 259.
Blake, Milton, ed. Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); references are to plate and line numbers.
Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude of 1850’, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979); references are to book and line numbers.
lle Selincourt, F:rnest. 1 tie Letters or William and Uorotny Wordswortn: 1 he Miadle Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937) II, 633.
Wordsworth, Prospectus to The Recluse’, line 1, Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Abrams et al. (New York: Norton, 1986) vol. 2, 5th edn.
Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘Revision as Making: The Prelude and its Peers’, Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 18–42.
This is what Geof frey H. Hartman has termed the via naturaliter negativa, or the ‘naturally negative way’, of the poet’s development in The Prelude; see Hartman, ‘A Poet’s Progress, ‘A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa’, Modem Philology 59 (1962): 214–24.
Mary Jacobus, ‘The Writing on the Wall: Autobiography and Self-Inscription in The Prelude’, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 8.
Hence Richard Bourke’s insistence that Wordsworth’s poetic programme be read as the appropriation of authority by the literary away from the political and financial, and thus as the poet’s elevation of himself above ideology and beyond accountability; see Bourke, Romantic Discourses and Political Modernity: Wordsworth, the Intellectual and Cultural Critique (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
For more on how this crisis phase is constructed as a lapse into picturesque poetry, see Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 189–260 and Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 157–213.
Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973) 182.
Jonathan Bate, ‘Keats’s Two Hyperions and the Problem of Milton’, Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 336–7.
Keats, The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman (New York: Scribners, 1939) vol 5, 303–4.
Keats, ‘Hyperion. A Fragment’, John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1988) 3rd edn; references are to book and line numbers.
Michael O’Neill, ‘When this Warm Scribe My Hand’: Writing and History in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion’, Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 154.
See O’Neill, as well as Mark Sandy, “To See as a God Sees”: The Potential Ubermensch in Keats’s Hyperion Fragments’, Romanticism 4 (1998): 212–23, and Christoph Bode, ‘Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion and Keats’s Poetics’, Wordsworth Circle 31 (2000): 31–7.
Carol L. Bernstein, ‘Subjectivity as Critique and the Critique of Subjectivity in Keats’s Hyperion’, After the Future: Postmodem Times and Places, ed. Gary Shapiro (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990) 42; Bernstein’s case is weakened, however, by being restricted to the first Hyperion, which means that her coherent knowing subject is not the poet of The Fall of Hyperion but Apollo in Hyperion, who, it seems, is inadequate to the task of carrying the burden of her argument.
Thomas Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with His Lordship at Pisa in the Years 1821 and 1822 (London: Henry Colbum, 1824) 164.
Byron, Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt (London: Penguin, 1993), rev. edn; references are to canto and stanza numbers.
Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan in Context (London: John Murray, 1976) xii.
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1963) 258; for a more recent discussion of nihilism in Don Juan, see Charles LaChance, Don Juan, “a Problem, Like All Things” ‘, Papers on Language and Literature 34 (1998): 273–300.
Donald H. Reiman, ‘Don Juan in Epic Context’, Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977): 587–94.
Wilkie, 188–226 and George deForest Lord, Trials of the Self Heroic Ordeals in the Epic Tradition (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983) 133–56.
Frederick Garber, ‘Self and the Language of Satire in Don Juan’, Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 5 (1982): 37.
McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 50.
For a good discussion of the difference between heteroglossia and polyphony, see Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) 112.
Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
See, particularly, Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Basingstoke: Macmillian, 1995) ch. 2.
Kathleen Blake, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth: The Romantic Poet as a Woman’, Victorian Poetry 24.4 (1986): 387–98.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (London: Chapman and Hall, 1863) 201, 198; the essay first appeared in The Athenaeum in 1842.
Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan, eds, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836–1854, (Winfield, KA: Wedgestone Press, 1983) III, 49.
Elvan Kintner, ed., The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1969) I, 31.
Holly A. Laird, ‘Aurora Leigh: An Epical Ars Poetica’, Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture, ed. Suzanne W. Jones (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) 353–70.
Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); references are to book and line numbers.
Beverly Taylor, “School-Miss Alfred” and “Materfamilias”: Female Sexuality and Poetic Voice in The Princess and Aurora Leigh’, Gender and Discourse in Victorian Art and Literature, ed. Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992) 24.
Angela Leighton, Elizabeth BarrettBrowning (Brighton: Harvester, 1986) 141–57.
Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 212.
Frederick G. Kenyon, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (New York: Macmillan, 1897) II, 228.
See, for example, Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia (1987; London: Verso, 2000) and Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman 1750–1850 (Lewisburg: Associated University Press, 2001).
For more on this, see Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Aurora Leigh: Epic Solutions to Novel Ends’, Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993) 62–83.
See, for example, L. D. Opul’skaya, Roman-epopoeia L. N. Tolstogo ‘Voina i mir’ (Tolstoy’s Epic-Novel, ‘War and Peace’), (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1987) and the discussion of Opul’skaya in Rimvydas Silbajoris, War and Peace: Tolstoy’s Mirror of the World (New York: Twayne, 1995) 110; Maksim Gorky, ‘Leo Tolstoy’, Sobranie Sochinenij (Collected Works) (Moscow: State Belles Lettres Publishing House, 1963), 18.80, qtd. in Silbajoris, 110.
Leo lblstoy, War and Peace, ed. Henry Gifford, trans. Louise and Alymer Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); references are to page numbers.
Ernest J. Simmons, Tolstoy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) 87.
John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966) 78.
Gary Saul Morson, ‘War and Peace’, The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 74.
Bayley, 136; for a discussion of Tolstoy’s attitude to French-speaking Russians and to France, see R. F. Christian, Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) 120–2, 147–8.
N. N. Strakhov, ‘Statyi o Voine i Mire’, Zarya (Articles on War and Peace’, Dawn) 1869–1870; qtd. in Simmons, 92. For commentary on Tolstoy and epic, see, for example, Harry J. Mooney, Tolstoy’s Epic Vision: A Study of War and Peace and Anna Karenina (Tulsa, FL: University of Tulsa, 1968).
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) 88–122.
Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987) 186, 9–36; see also Isaiah Berlin’s classic study, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953).
For a useful comparison between Tolstoy and Joyce, see George R. Clay, ‘Tolstoy in the Twentieth Century’, Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Orwin, 206–21.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed. J. M. Gray (London: Penguin, 1983).
Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1897) II, 89–90.
John D. Rosenberg, The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973) 33 and Robert Pattison, Tennyson and Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) 143–4.
Henry Kozicki, Tennyson and Clio: History in the Major Poems (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979) 131.
Alastair Thomson, The Poetry of Tennyson (London: Routledge, 1986) 167.
Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 322.
Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick (London: Penguin, 1971).
Richard D. Altick and James F. Loucks, Browning’s Roman Murder Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) 9.
William E. Buckler, Poetry and Truth in Browning’s The Ring and the Book (New York: New York University Press, 1985) 282–8 and Ann P. Brady, Pompilia: A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988).
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© 2006 Adeline Johns-Putra
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Johns-Putra, A. (2006). The Nineteenth Century: Epic and the Self. In: The History of the Epic. Palgrave Histories of Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595729_5
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