TY - JOUR
AU1 - Vance, Norman
AB - Reviews Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), x + 737 pages, hardback, £35 (ISBN 978 0 19 923298 7) Oh! Southey! Southey! cease thy varied song! A bard may chant too often and too long. Byron’s mockery of Southey in Don Juan for producing a new epic every spring may be partly to blame for the eclipse of the most ancient and dignified of all the literary kinds, though it is tempting to think that Southey’s interminable iambics did most of the damage on their own. Prose fiction became more readable as epics seemed to become less so, prompting the traditional conclusion that by the nineteenth century the novel had effectively killed off the epic. But Herbert Tucker will have none of this. He has made a significant, indeed heroic, contribution to literary history – and incidentally helped to rescue the proto-Victorian Southey from the shadows – by demonstrating at length and in chronological order that an apparently moribund literary form still had the capacity for renewal and self-transformation throughout the long nineteenth century, often responding to stirring contemporary events while ostensibly telling a tale of other times and other places. His 
TI - Epic and the Big Picture
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.3366/E1355550209000885
DA - 2009-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/epic-and-the-big-picture-5mbsvHkA1N
SP - 313
EP - 317
VL - 14
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -