Reviewed by: Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 by Herbert F. Tucker Emily Doucet Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 by Herbert F. Tucker; pp. 737. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. $94.50 cloth. In his prodigious Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910, Herbert F. Tucker excavates a history of the epic in the long nineteenth century in an attempt to correct the “categorical erasure of the epic genre from our working picture of the nineteenth century” (10). “Literary history must have its victim” (4), argues Tucker in his introduction, and the epic in the nineteenth century is one such victim, in part because the rise of the novel and of modernity are stories told at the expense of the epic, which is presented “either as a casualty of great old age or as a sacrifice exacted to consecrate the birth of that modern consciousness from whose vantage literary history is perennially put together” (4). In Tucker’s account, the histories of both the development of the novel and of modernism require the concurrent history of the epic’s “surviving tradition” (7) during the long century, a history which has hitherto been ignored. In Tucker’s reasoning, if literary critics can kill off the epic, then they can also resurrect it. After the first theoretical and introductory chapter, he presents, in eleven chronological chapters (most treating a single decade), the evidence of hundreds of epics—the bibliography of poems cited runs to over twenty pages—written and circulated between 1790 and 1910. He offers sustained readings of only a portion of this list, ranging from Erasmus Darwin’s 1791 Botanic Garden to Thomas Hardy’s 1910 Dynasts. These chapters each read their epics according to “the gust of the zeitgeist as a given decade’s epic output shows it blowing” (8), and if these gusts occasionally seem suspiciously tidy, and conveniently divisible by decade, they are also appropriate to the larger purpose of the work, which is to counter received literary histories with Tucker’s own. And so Tucker begins his work. “We need to tell a different story,” Tucker writes, “one that organizes phases into episodes and then connects the episodes in series to a history that matters” (10). Tucker explains that Epic is less interested in “theoretical arguments, explications de texte, or even the thick description of epic texts concurrently produced” (10); as he succeeds in his stated aims so well, it seems churlish to look for those absent elements. Tucker’s “alternative story” (8) is a sound one, which makes a highly readable case for a counter-historical narrative in which the epic is still very active indeed, busy at the work that the nineteenth century’s victorious genre, the novel, cannot do. Epics tell their readers stories about themselves as members of communities, however construed. “Bold-faced or latent, mutant or rote,” argues Tucker, “the epic conventions that litter the nineteenth-century landscape were not fossils but proofs attesting the bard’s membership in a guild and the reader’s stake in a heritage” (26). In ways unavailable to the novel, the epic was able to engage, on a large scale, with notions of belonging and inheritance, of communities and cultures, in order to place the nineteenth century reading-subject within the whole sweep of human history. It is the epic, argues Tucker, that offers “the [End Page 153] successful articulation of a collective identity that links origins to destinies by way of heroic value in imagined action” (13). In short, it is the epic that can make a community known to itself. Tucker’s twenty-odd-page list of poems cited is accompanied by an extensive and thorough review of secondary scholarship, and his frequent footnotes provide a lively and helpful overview of the history of many of the scholarly debates with which he engages in his text. Tucker wears his impressive research lightly, however, and Epic is a remarkably engaging work, even when it is busy discussing poems that, by Tucker’s own admission, are not good, or much read. For a book of this size, and with such an expansive genre as its subject, it also works remarkably well...
72ARTHURIANA century, priests were allowed to marry, but as the doctrine of transubstantiation was developed, the clerical wife herself was seen as a polluting presence for the minister ofthe altar. Since the priest handled the very body and blood ofChrist, he had to be absolutely pure, and part ofthis purity was abstention from sexual activity as well as withdrawal from the very temptation to engage in such activity. The clerical wife was seen as an ambigous, mixed hybrid. Peter Damián wrote that 'God recognizes only three kinds of women: virgins, wives, and widows.' One wonders just how Peter knows this. The clerical wife did not fit any of these categories, and so she could not arrive in God's presence. The last chapter deals with demonology, discussing angelic and demonic disembodiment and the idea that since demons have no body, they cannot be sexually defiled. Professor Elliott must be commended for the clarity of her prose in presenting original sources as well as intricate analytical unraveling of much of this material, which seemed arcane to this reader. It is astonishing that the church would use so many resources in proving or disproving the notion ofdemonic bodies and for the control ofnight emissions in the male clergy. This last was largely due to ignorance about the working of the body. The attempt to control women, however, is more serious because, as Professor Elliott shows, the next step was the burning ofwomen as witches, a further attempt to get rid of pollution. By using the analytic tools provided by Mary Douglas and Freud, Professor Elliott anchors her argument in the insights of modern psychoanalysis while she presents the material without polemics. She has given us a very important book that rewards careful reading. JACQUELINE DF. WEEVER Brooklyn College, CUNY JODY enders, The Medieval Theater ofCruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. 237. isbn: 0-8014-3334-7. $45. This is an intellectually challenging if not completely successful book that deserves serious consideration by medievalists, although it also aims for a broader audience interested in contemporary theories of violence. The most substantive section explores the role of violence in the memory systems of classical rhetoric. At the center of the book is a study of intentional violence—torture—in the medieval French mystères. Finally, these historical materials provoke 'an extensive meditation about the interplay among theatricality, pleasure, didacticism, morality and real life' (235). The reading of rhetoric and the discussion of drama combine to form a powerful argument about the functions of pain and violence in engendering the aesthetic; however, the speculations about the universality ofcruelty and the moral stance one should take toward it seem less fully achieved. For Enders, what is at stake is our 'well-intentioned deference to the concept of alterity' [of the Middle Ages] which, she argues, 'maywell have masked a very real denial ofthe contemporary spectacle ofviolence and ofcontemporary complicity in the history ofthat violence' (24). REVIEWS 73 Enders's first claim is that rhetoric had established an ideological connection between the subject of torture and the processes of inventio, memoria, and actio. Her second move is to suggest that such conceptual links between creative invention, dramatic catharsis, and human suffering that emerged from the rhetorical treatments oftorture (and circulated in the classical, medieval, and early Renaissance educational systems) subtended the dramatic representation of violence. The well-established rhetorical formulae that emphasized the efficacy of violent proofs for producing 'truth,' she argues, 'encouraged the dramatic representation ofviolence as a means ofcoercing theater audiences into accepting the various "truths" enacted didactically in mysteries, miracles, and even farces' (4). These are daring claims, and Enders must resort to such locutions as 'it is thus probable' or 'he may have done so' when making the link between rhetoric and theater. Despite the fragility of her own rhetoric at times, her analysis ofthe figure oftorture in rhetorical texts is compelling and forces a reexamination of scenes of violence and torture in the drama. Enders's discussion of torture's important place in the rhetorical tradition draws on poststructural theories ofthe violence ofrepresentation, which arc in turn based on the Nietzschean insight that pain produces...