TY - JOUR
AU - Tucker, Herbert F.
AB - Herbert F. Tucker In their shrewd introduction, Adelene Buckland and Anna Vaninskaya imply something I frankly hadn’t realised: that my two main areas of scholarly concern during the last decade, one to do with epic, the other with current prospects for a formalist revival in the writing of literary history, may in some respects have been of a piece. Defining some of these commonalities will form the burden of this afterword. Buckland and Vaninskaya build their introduction to the present set of essays around this problem of epic’s relationship to history. On the one hand, “Epic is not just a form given to history. Epic claims to be history.’’ Since Homer’s time its survival has “depended upon its absorption of everything a culture had to offer’’ (B&V p. 164). Yet this very condition, as Buckland and Vaninskaya go on to observe, is one that the ramification of modern culture made it impossible to meet. This quandary left Victorian epoists with a choice between two alternatives each of which was generically decadent. Either they could leverage epic’s former “implied universality’’ so as to “aggrandize claims for the sectarian, the local, and the fragmented histories and values which preoccupied the age’’ 
TI - Afterword
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.3366/E1355550209000824
DA - 2009-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/afterword-E28LCnbG4M
SP - 255
EP - 260
VL - 14
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -