6 - Mapping Epic and Novel

Summary

To include discussion, in a book on epic in the nineteenth century, of Middlemarch and Aurora Leigh is an indication, it might be thought, of the overwhelming predominance of the novel in the period. Certainly the pull of the novel form – its massive cultural and social presence as much as its specific gravity as a mode – makes any discussion of contiguous genres necessarily involve some negotiation with its characteristic procedures. Not only epic in the nineteenth century but also romance, the drama and painting (to restrict examples to the aesthetic sphere) were dragged into the orbit of the novel. On the other hand, an opposite usage has taken the transformations of epic, envisaged by such writers as Barrett Browning and George Eliot, and used the word to describe almost indiscriminately the novel itself, so that it has become possible to speak with apparent appropriateness of the novel as providing the epic of bourgeois life, or more generally the epic of ordinary lives. It is not far from here to contemporary usages of the term in which epic is simply equivalent to ‘long’.

Behind these usages are various and complex generic negotiations such as those which I sought to describe in the previous chapter. But the relationship of epic to novel, in large terms, was also the subject of considerable and fruitful debate in the twentieth century; the critical and theoretical arguments to be considered in this chapter were not, however, mere acts of retrospective reflection on an inert literary history, but more importantly constituted a way of arguing through questions of modernity, nationality, and – latterly – the phenomenon we have come to know as globalisation.