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 Six - Epic Heroinism: [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner’s Ring]
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
The Prelude wore the name of its immediate audience on its sleeve. Wordsworth's frequent apostrophe, “O Friend,” addresses the principal reader, auditor and inspirer of this very private poem. We know the friend to have been Coleridge, whom Wordsworth first met in 1795 and with whom he collaborated on the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads (1798). Coleridge returned the favor with the opening words (“O Friend”) of his 118 lines of iambic pentameter, “To William Wordsworth,” written on the night the poet finished reading aloud the complete 1805 Prelude. There Coleridge installs his friend “in the choir / Of ever-enduring Men.” What these biographical details tell us is that, in its original incarnation, The Prelude was fashioned as a poem in which one man is author and another man is audience. This male-to-male epic is, in Wordsworth's words at the end of the final book, an “offering of my love.”
Maleness is central to the structure, performance and contents of The Prelude—and in that respect is very much like a great many earlier poems, from the Iliad forward, in the history of epic. Women are barely present in Wordsworth's poem, save for the long digression on Julia and Vaudracour in Book Nine, intermittent homages to his sister Dorothy, and tributes to his old “dame” Ann Tyson who mothered him in the years after his actual mother died when he was eight years old. By 1832, the most extensive attention to a woman, the more than 400 lines on the story of Julia and Vaudracour, had been excised for a reason that has long been guessed: it was a veiled analogue to his own youthful affair in France with Annette Vallon and the birth of their daughter Caroline. The future poet laureate was learning to be discreet.
It is no surprise that in what is, essentially, a coming-of-age poem the male figure of the poet is at its center.
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- Epic Ambitions in Modern TimesFrom Paradise Lost to the New Millennium, pp. 81 - 96Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2022