Framed by the interrelated questions, “What are the historical conditions that underlie the production of epic poetry, and do the wholly different circumstances of modernity prevent the writing of further poetry in the same heroic mode?” (1), Simon Dentith's Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain is organized by the concept of “epic primitivism,” whereby the epic becomes simultaneously an indicator of “the historic alterity of the barbaric world” and our (i.e., the developed world’s) distance from it by virtue of “our own modernity” (1). Epic primitivism, however, is understood in complex and productive ways as a temporal and spatial concept: viewed as organically belonging to a premodern past that has been definitively superseded, epic and its equivalents persist (a) “throughout the world in societies or among those [subject] peoples [of empire] who are still at the barbarous stage of their progress” and (b) as “the necessary form to be rediscovered in the atavistic business of building an empire” (13).

Dentith's book is chronologically arranged, tracking the various permutations of, and ambivalences generated by, “theories of epic primitivism” (4) from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concluding with a “Coda” on “Homeric Futures” that considers examples from the more recent present—Mazisi Kunene's Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic (London, 1979) and Derek Walcott's Omeros (London, 1990), for instance. However, Dentith's analysis, rather than tracing a progression whereby some of the contradictions and ambivalences attending the concept are resolved in the earlier historical moment to set the stage for a new direction in the succeeding one, circles back on a similar “interconnected set of ideas and aesthetic challenges,” in different historical moments, that are then “worked through to sometimes congruent and sometimes opposed or contradictory ends” (4). For working through these interconnected ideas and challenges in an exemplary fashion, Walter Scott functions as a paradigmatic figure to whom Dentith returns to often in the course of his analysis, despite casting his net wide by considering a host of different nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers—Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard, to name only some.

Dentith's is an ambitious book, not only because it analyzes a range of writers but also because it pursues the implications of epic primitivism for a range of significant sociopolitical and cultural projects that define the periods he studies—the translation of epics, the possibilities of writing national poetry and national epic, and the represention of empire and its subject peoples. He adds to this range, furthermore, by considering both poetry and the novel, devoting one half of his book to each form.

Several of his book's concerns intersect with those of recent scholarship in which the interactions between epic, (British) nationalism and empire have been examined (e.g., Colin Graham's Ideologies of Empire: Nation and Empire in Victorian Poetry [Manchester, 1998], Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire [Princeton, NJ, 1997], and David Quint's Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton [Princeton, NJ, 1993], to name but three). What distinguishes Dentith's study, however, is its resolute focus on epic primitivism, whose history (and fortunes) he traces, not least through the debates whose varied investments the epic helps articulate (and through which it gets defined). These are debates about (a) the nature of (a pallid) modernity and the ambivalent charge of the barbarous premodern to which belongs excitement, sublimity, and glamour; (b) “the history of human societies through their various stages” (5); and (c) forging an appropriate idiom (such as the choice of the ballad meter) for a modern or contemporary epic, or for the translation of a premodern one, in a society that has transcended the premodern or, alternatively, that is deemed inhospitable or simply inadequate to its creation. In the process, Dentith analyzes the work of well-known but also little-known writers (like the translators of Homer William Maginn and F. W. Newman) and of “philosophical historians” (like Adam Ferguson and George Grote). He also analyzes the transformation of “the generic inheritance of epic to contemporary ends” (3) by writers like George Eliot and Barrett Browning, who feminize it, and Kipling, who settles for a “demotic and popular version of the epic of empire” (3).

Dentith's analysis proceeds in textured and complex ways and seems, to me, to offer some of its richest insights when it is involved in reading the (productive) inconsistencies or circularity of the arguments through which a given method or concept/subject gets defined or explained. For example, Dentith characterizes “the whole historicising mode of reading” Vico undertakes in his account of Homer as an “interpretative circle” in which “the progression of human society through various stages” is demonstrated through evidence from “epic poetry … of the heroic or barbarous stage which preceded contemporary civility”; as a result, “knowledge of history and text derive from and reinforce each other” (6). Elsewhere, Dentith argues that “forgery, imitation and pastiche” (12) became the inevitable modes through which writers who wished to write an “epic in the modern world,” while believing “in the [epic’s] essential antiquity” (11), had to proceed. This “entail[ed] a complex negotiation between text and reader, in which a simultaneous recognition of the supposed antiquity of the verse form [was] coupled with a knowledge of its actual contemporaneity” (12)—a complexity further heightened by the ambivalent attraction these writers felt for the qualities associated with the epic and with the barbarous premodern society.

Dentith's analysis of how the epic is read, produced, and translated in the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century via the concept of epic primitivism is, to my mind, both timely and time determined in the sense that it both emerges from and contributes to those contemporary debates that address (and are a part of) the “cultural” turn in historical scholarship, which shows how historical “fact” is always not only implicated in its interpretation but also, and more important, understood from a position distant from and other than that in which it happened or was enacted.