Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry - Hardcover

Graham, Colin

9780719052859: Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719052858 ISBN 13: 9780719052859

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 1998

This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as a significant forerunner of contemporary black writers; her story throws light on the problems facing politicised black artists. In challenging definitions of 'race' and 'gender' in her political and creative work, she forged a valiant path for later black feminists. Her enormous social and cultural contributions to the Caribbean and Britain have, until now, remained hidden in archives and memoirs around the world.

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Review:

'An excellent book, a very readable biography of a fascinating woman who led a varied and in many ways an exciting life. Thoroughly researched and well documented, this is a major event in the field of Caribbean cultural studies.' Dr Stewart Brown, University of Birmingham

Synopsis:

Examines the cultural and national politics of the epic poem in the imperial context of the Victorian period. Taking Bakhtin's theory of epic as a national and monologic form, this text tests and adapts Bakhtin's ideas through a discussion of the meeting of colonial discourses in epic poems originating from England, Ireland and India. Through analysis of the work of three poets, Tennyson, Samuel Ferguson and Edwin Arnold, this book shows how epic as a form attaches itself to and constructs ideas of nationality and argues that when these national forms are placed in the heterogeneous contexts of empire, the nationality of epic is called into question. The result is a series of texts that strive for formal and cultural authority, but which can be read instead as revealing moments of doubt, weakness and instability in the cultures and the politics they seek to represent.

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