A Disimprisoned Epic

Book excerpt: 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.