Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution captured the Victorian imagination with vivid pictures of a society in conflict. A rich, brilliant, and arresting book, it defined a crucial epoch in modern European history for generations of British readers. Nevertheless, The French Revolution has lost not only its general readership but also its academic audience, for it is not history as history is commonly practiced, and it is not literature as literature is commonly understood. Only in the past few decades has this difficult yet rewarding text moved back to the central position it deserves. In A Disimprisoned Epic, Mark Cumming elucidates the formal genesis of the French Revolution in Carlyle's literary criticism and reestablishes it as an epic experiment in literary form. He discusses specifically how The French Revolution combines the myths of epic with the facts of history; the nobility of tragedy with the grotesque absurdity of farce; the devotion of elegy with the dismissive rancor of satire; and the didactic clarity of emblem and allegory with the confusion of symbol, fragment, and phantasmagory. A Disimprisoned Epic will be useful to scholars and students of Carlyle and of Victorian British and American literature.

The author demonstrates how Thomas Carlyle, in virtually all his writings, conducted a search for a new centre of social and political authority that would fit his changing world.

A study of how romantic irony characterizes works, in various genres, by Carlyle, Thackeray, Browning, Arnold, Dickens, Tennyson, and Pater. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Covering a wide range of authors, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Clare, Mary Shelley and Disraeli, Cronin brings light and order to one of the murkiest quarters in recent British literary history. Brimming with intelligent and original perceptions about authors of works that have fallen through literary-historical cracks, Romantic Victorians offers shrewd assessments of their formal and tactical designs.

Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.