Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Whatever Happened to the Epic? : [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]
- Chapter Two Leaving Paradise: [The final books of Paradise Lost and the end of an epic tradition]
- Chapter Three An Epic Told in Letters: [The migration of epic to the novel in Richardson’s Clarissa]
- Chapter Four Prospects and Living Pictures: [Epic history-writing in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
- Chapter Five Analyzing a Soul: [Wordsworth’s Prelude and Autobiographical Epic]
- Chapter Six Epic Heroinism: [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner’s Ring]
- Chapter Seven Cinematic Spectacle and the Hero: [The epic in film: Hollywood in the 1960s, and Abel Gance’s silent Napoléon]
- Chapter Eight Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey: [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings]
- Chapter Nine Imaginary History and Epic Fantasy: [Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion]
- Chapter Ten The Epic in Future Tense: [Frederick Turner’s three epic poems: The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse]
- Chapter Eleven Heaven and Hell Reimagined: [Tony Kushner’s Angels in America]
- Chapter Twelve Translating and Recentering Old Epics: [Contemporary translations of ancient epics and fictional adaptations by Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Madeline Miller, Maria Dahvana Headley]
- Index
Chapter Four - Prospects and Living Pictures: [Epic history-writing in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Whatever Happened to the Epic? : [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]
- Chapter Two Leaving Paradise: [The final books of Paradise Lost and the end of an epic tradition]
- Chapter Three An Epic Told in Letters: [The migration of epic to the novel in Richardson’s Clarissa]
- Chapter Four Prospects and Living Pictures: [Epic history-writing in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]
- Chapter Five Analyzing a Soul: [Wordsworth’s Prelude and Autobiographical Epic]
- Chapter Six Epic Heroinism: [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner’s Ring]
- Chapter Seven Cinematic Spectacle and the Hero: [The epic in film: Hollywood in the 1960s, and Abel Gance’s silent Napoléon]
- Chapter Eight Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey: [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings]
- Chapter Nine Imaginary History and Epic Fantasy: [Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion]
- Chapter Ten The Epic in Future Tense: [Frederick Turner’s three epic poems: The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse]
- Chapter Eleven Heaven and Hell Reimagined: [Tony Kushner’s Angels in America]
- Chapter Twelve Translating and Recentering Old Epics: [Contemporary translations of ancient epics and fictional adaptations by Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Madeline Miller, Maria Dahvana Headley]
- Index
Summary
In his account of the dramatic rise of Islam that counterbalanced the Roman empire's long, slow descent into ruin, Edward Gibbon registers the claim of the eighth-century caliph Abdalrahman that he experienced only 14 days of unadulterated happiness in his life. Gibbon found this declaration so remarkable that he wrote one of the most personal of his 8,000 footnotes to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “If I may speak of myself (the only person of whom I can speak with certainty), my happy hours have far exceeded, and far exceed, the scanty numbers of the caliph of Spain; and I shall not scruple to add, that many of them are due to the pleasing labour of the present composition” (III. 346, n50). Gibbon's assertion of the pleasures of history-writing is itself worth remarking, given his recurrent grim pronouncements on the nature of history. Early on, he characterizes the source materials of his narrative as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind” (I.102). And in the sixth and final volume, he refers to his project simply as “the history of blood” (III.791). How did Gibbon manage, as he says in the final sentence of his monumental work, to be “amused and exercised near twenty years of my life” (III.1085) with researching, recording, shap¬ing and composing a history so dense with iniquities, catastrophic misjudgments, wanton cruelty and sheer stupidity?
It is perhaps the shaping, more than anything else, that is the key to understanding the pleasure Gibbon took in the epic undertaking of constructing a history that spanned 15 centuries and three continents. “History” is as far removed as possible from what Richardson had in mind when subtitling his novel “the history of a young lady.” Gibbon's act of shaping would need to be strikingly different from Clarissa's microscopic charting of actions and feelings. Nevertheless it may not be surprising that the other great experiment with epic narration in eighteenth-century England should occur in large-scale history-writing. Repeatedly, the authors and many of the critics of the early novel saw it as allied with biography and history rather than with romance and fantasy.
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- Epic Ambitions in Modern TimesFrom Paradise Lost to the New Millennium, pp. 49 - 64Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2022