Carlyle and the epic as genre
Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame
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[Chapter 3, note 24, of the author's 
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There have been a number of discussions of Carlyle's use of epic devices and the influence of Homer on his writings, but little on his conception of epic until Mark Cumming's
In the early nineteenth century, there were nearly as many definitions of epic as there were critics and no consensus on what constituted the epic canon. Thus, while Carlyle drew on recent scholarship, he had considerable freedom in how to define epic (Foerster, 31-34-1 see also Jenkyns, chap. 9; Turner, chap. 4). Mark Cumming's study confirms and provides considerable evidence beyond that presented here that Carlyle was reshaping epic to suit his own literary ends. Cumming demonstrates how Carlyle combines romance, satire, elegy, farce, tragedy, emblem, fragment, allegory, phantasmagory, and so on to create a heterogeneous form. However, I would note that Cumming tends to discuss these genres as opposed pairs, pitting a univocal against a multivocal, or closed versus open, form (emblem versus fragment, for example, or allegory versus phantasmagory). Cumming suggests that multivocality undermines univocality, whereas I find that the desire for univocality and closure persists in tension with multivocality.
Last modified 26 October 2001