TY - JOUR
AU - Ledger-Lomas, Michael
AB - The Great Consummation: Christ and Epic in the Later Nineteenth Century Michael Ledger-Lomas Scholars who have taken the literary pulse of Christian epic in the Victorian period argue that it was more or less moribund by the end of the 1860s. For Herbert Tucker, epics based on the Bible had drawn a hectic vitality from the crisis of revolution, state formation and economic change that stretched from the French Revolution to the mid-nineteenth century. The fight against Napoleon had launched a fleet of Exodiads, revivifying the conviction that the elect nation of Israel was analogous to if not quite the archetype of Britain. Bank crashes, the collapse of the Second Reformation in Ireland, Catholic Emancipation and Reform – the cataclysm of ancien régime Protestantism – had encouraged Evangelicals to brood on an impending last judgment, a ‘great visible era of doom and triumph.’ The long afternoon of Victorian liberalism supplied fewer such exogenous shocks to stir the biblical and apocalyptic imagination: Gladstone features in David Gange’s essay as a patron and a reader of epics, but not as their hero. For Tucker, epics that ordered the world around Christ and the Bible fell out of fashion during a new 
TI - The Great Consummation: Christ and Epic in the Later Nineteenth Century
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.3366/E1355550209000770
DA - 2009-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-great-consummation-christ-and-epic-in-the-later-nineteenth-century-LPCFrkgATg
SP - 173
EP - 189
VL - 14
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -