Historical poetics and the definition of epic in the eighteenth century

What was the epic for eighteenth‐century Anglophone readers and writers? And how did those expectations differ from later definitions of the genre? This paper advocates an approach to historical poetics centered on these questions. Older approaches to historical poetics, including Mikhail Bakhtin's influential theory of the novel, impose modern ideas of post‐Miltonic decline and modern expectations of epic as a rigid, “half‐moribund,” “classic” genre, representative of an inaccessible, “absolute past.” Yet eighteenth‐century writers approached the epic as a living genre defined by its capacity to “form the manners,” even in the present moment. Resurrecting this lost understanding could provide a large‐scale analytical framework supportive of various kinds of historicist research now prevalent in eighteenth‐century studies—book history, intellectual history, theory, criticism, and the digital humanities—to accommodate new models for thinking about the rise and fall of genres. The most obvious payoffs are local. Reviving old definitions of epic accommodates an earlier hierarchy of poetic making in which translation was not deemed inferior to original composition, and in which epic canons were not yet dominated by Homer and Dante. Alternative contemporary approaches to historical poetics and genre assert the primacy of philosophically‐logical definitions of genre, or of generic rules derived from hyper‐canonical examples; the present approach seeks newfound coherence in the previously marginalized or misunderstood. Historical poetics can unearth forgotten connections, reveal the eighteenth century as something other than an epic wasteland, and—by recovering lost abstractions—facilitate more global, cross‐linguistic comparisons than familiar, racialized, Western‐centered ideas of epic encourage. Recovering lost generic definitions also demands meta‐critical reflection on the descriptive limitations of modern(ist) conceptions, including confidence in “genre memory.” The case of the epic demonstrates that genres do not always remember their pasts. Even classic genres suffer desuetude and deprecation that modern interpreters must work imaginatively to overcome.