THEORIES OF EPIC IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Epic poetry was generally regarded as the most important and prestigious literary genre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Dryden, ‘A heroic poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform’, and criticism of epic was regarded as the most important branch of writing about literature. Yet the vast corpus of material on the subject of epic has tended to be dismissed in conventional accounts of the cultural landscape. Because no great epic poem was produced in the eighteenth century, the debates and discussion of epic technique have been regarded as an anachronism and relegated to the status of a curiosity.

This analysis of epic criticism will argue that writings on epic need to be given much greater prominence in accounts of the eighteenth century, and in particular in the story of the rise of the novel. We cannot comprehend the context in which novels were produced without some understanding of contemporary cultural expectations. We need to know what people wanted from their most important literary form, and what they felt their national literature should be doing. In many ways epic formed a standard against which the novel was measured and an understanding of eighteenth-century ideas of epic is therefore crucial in assessing the critical status of the fictional form.

In addition, the incorporation of epic into the story of the rise of the novel causes a substantial modification of the narrative.