An Epilogue In Medias Res: Fragmentation Past and Future

Summary

This book has both examined and reconceived the notion that Romantic epics tend towards fragmentation. By attending to the epic revival’s relationship to the friction between the missionary enterprise and imperialism, I have shown how Romantic epics often deploy tropes of the genre to respond to disjunctions in their own form and content, especially the conceptual contradictions within their developing ideologies. While works like Pye’s Alfred seek to contain and diminish these conflicts to promote unified ideas of the nation or empire, more audacious engagements with epic expose the fissures in imperial discourse. The most daring of these epics are the most imaginatively powerful, and they have survived in the Romantic canon.