Publisher's Synopsis
This study is the first to provide detailed and wide-ranging accounts of all the varieties of long poem - epic, romance, verse-novel and sequences - published in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Ninteenth-century writers themselves saw these grand poetic projects as their greatest achievements and Adam Roberts?s summaries and critical accounts of these often neglected masterpieces render them accessible to the modern student, researcher and general reader. From famous works (The Prelude, In Memoriam, The Ring and the Book) to lesser-known works (Erasmus Darwin?s The Loves of the Plants or Edward Lytton?s King Poppy: a story without an end), this study provides a detailed book-by-book précis, relevant contextual information, biographical entries on authors and critical entries on the categories of long poem. A critical introduction examines why it was that the long poem was so central to Romantic and Victorian art and why ?epic? is still one of the weightiest modes of writing even today.
