Marx's question, posed for himself in his notebooks in 1857, trenchantly formulates a characteristic nineteenth-century idea, though this brief quotation gives it an especially technological emphasis. What are the historical conditions which underlie the production of epic poetry, and do the wholly different social circumstances of modernity prevent the writing of further poetry in the same heroic mode? Marx was not alone in assuming the radical historical otherness of the social world from which epic emerged; he was the heir, indeed, of a considerable intellectual tradition, with its roots in the Enlightenment, for which the essential antiquity of primary epics such as Homer's was a central contention. In this tradition, epic becomes the foremost evidence of the historical alterity of the barbaric world; by the same token, it becomes a principal indicator of our own modernity. The implications of this fundamental insight are pursued in what follows.

This book addresses, then, one particular understanding of epic in the nineteenth century, briefly summed up under the phrase ‘epic primitivism’. It pursues the consequences of this idea for the meaning of a national poetry in Britain, for the translation of epic, for the possibility of writing a national epic and for the conception of empire and its subject peoples.