TY - JOUR
AU - O'Connor, Ralph
AB - From the Epic of Earth History to the Evolutionary Epic in Nineteenth-Century Britain Ralph O’Connor Ancient history – whether taken from the Bible or the classics – furnished ambitious writers in the nineteenth century with material for epics aplenty. But that history was dwarfed by the vast spaces of pre-human earthly time disclosed by the emerging science of geology. Controversial at first among the British public, this new story, told by geologists, was widely accepted by century’s end. To what extent, then, did this most ancient but most innovative of histories find itself commemorated in epic form? Traditional literary history has shed only partial light on this question. Several of the poets treated in Herbert Tucker’s magisterial Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2008) turn out to have engaged with geology and evolution, but Tucker’s exclusive focus on poetry prevents him from making cross-generic links with the prose genres normally associated with scientific exposition (but rarely considered as ‘literature’). More sustained analysis of Victorian epic writing on this subject, though restricted to prose, has come from historians of science. Bernard Lightman’s ground-breaking Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) contains a chapter on what he calls ‘the evolutionary epic’: scientific writings that 
TI - From the Epic of Earth History to the Evolutionary Epic in Nineteenth-Century Britain
JO - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.3366/E1355550209000794
DA - 2009-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/from-the-epic-of-earth-history-to-the-evolutionary-epic-in-nineteenth-8uYmVukd00
SP - 207
EP - 223
VL - 14
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -