Ideologies of Epic : Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry

Examines the cultural and national politics of the epic poem in the imperial context of the Victorian period.

Taking Bakhtin's theory of epic as a national and monologic form, this text tests and adapts Bakhtin's ideas through a discussion of the meeting of colonial discourses in epic poems originating from England, Ireland and India. Through analysis of the work of three poets, Tennyson, Samuel Ferguson and Edwin Arnold, this book shows how epic as a form attaches itself to and constructs ideas of nationality and argues that when these national forms are placed in the heterogeneous contexts of empire, the nationality of epic is called into question.

The result is a series of texts that strive for formal and cultural authority, but which can be read instead as revealing moments of doubt, weakness and instability in the cultures and the politics they seek to represent.