This book has both examined and reconceived the notion that Romantic epics tend towards fragmentation. By attending to the epic revival’s relationship to the friction between the missionary enterprise and imperialism, I have shown how Romantic epics often deploy tropes of the genre to respond to disjunctions in their own form and content, especially the conceptual contradictions within their developing ideologies. While works like Pye’s Alfred seek to contain and diminish these conflicts to promote unified ideas of the nation or empire, more audacious engagements with epic expose the fissures in imperial discourse. The most daring of these epics are the most imaginatively powerful, and they have survived in the Romantic canon.

My examination of the general trends in epic writings of the 1790s lays the ground for my fourth chapter to explore one of the more curious epics of that decade: ‘Brutus’, by Ann Yearsley. The chapter explores how Yearsley uses the resources of the epic genre to claim a cultural authority that permits her to promote the idea of an uplifting colonialism that seeks to transform indigenous populations. Yet she seeks to qualify and critique this ideology of Christian imperialism by calling attention to its accompanying dangers. Attending to the ways she draws attention to the racial hybridity of conversion narratives – as well as the ways she deflects the anxieties summoned by such hybridity – I show how Yearsley implicitly claims for herself a transcendent interiority that both aligns her with the middle class and allows her to assert independence from those who would exert authority over her, such as her former patron Hannah More.

The seventh chapter studies how Blake’s poem Milton (c.1804) reconceives key aspects of epic tradition as it refigures missionary work as a metaphor for promoting freedom from the limitations of imperial discourse. Showing how literal missionary work can assist empire by holding people in states of subjection, Blake more abstractly repudiates the limitations that Equiano addresses concretely. I argue that Blake locates in the tensions between missionary work and empire the resources to oppose imperialism. While some of Blake’s rhetoric resembles that of actual missionaries and imperialists of his day, I suggest that Blake works from within such orthodox discourses to undermine them. The unresolved contradictions in Blake’s Milton – both in his use of the epic genre and in his appeals to religious and imperial rhetoric – heighten the challenge that he poses to the stable circumscriptions of imperial discourse.

Chapter 2 augments this framework by surveying the history of the evangelical revival, emphasizing the anxious relationship between missionaries and empire. I examine the growth of missionary societies, their conflicts with empire, and their descent into the underworld of collusion with imperialists. I highlight key moments in this history, including the Vellore Mutiny, which raised concerns about evangelism among more secular exponents of empire, and the subversive work of Johannes Van der Kemp among the Khoi in South Africa. The chapter concludes with a close examination of two brief epics composed by missionary propagandists in the 1790s, Thomas Williams and Thomas Beck. These poems reveal the early conceptual friction between evangelism and imperialism, but they also indicate the assumptions that would enable the two projects to be aligned in the nineteenth century.

My fifth chapter extends my investigation of how epic could facilitate the imagining of a coordination of evangelism and imperialism and also provide, through tensions inherent in the genre, space to critique of the developing ideology of Christian imperialism. I examine Robert Southey’s Madoc as a cautious depiction of Christian conversion: even as Southey regards it as uplifting and beneficial, he expresses wariness about evangelism’s potential to sanction injustice. Conveying the remnants of Southey’s misgivings about the tyrannical potential of established religion, along with his suspicion about the overly enthusiastic zeal of many missionaries, Madoc traces similarities between Christians and non-Christians as a technique to affirm colonial authority, even as it strives to contain the tensions summoned by this strategy. Through his revisions of the epic genre, Southey advocates a need continuously to reform Christianity, empire, and epic, and so continuously to purge them of a tyrannous potential that he believed accompanied them.

The framework and historical overview of my opening two chapters allow me to attend in Chapter 3 to the variety of epic productions in the 1790s. Surveying these epics, the chapter underlines the ways that they promote different ideas of British identity as they support, critique, and oppose the budding ideologies of Christian nationalism and imperialism. The chapter considers conservative epics that serve practically as propaganda for Tory politics and nascent imperialist sentiment (such as Henry James Pye’s Alfred), progressive epics that challenge both epic tradition and reactionary politics while still acquiescing to some assumptions of imperialist discourse, and religious epics that envision an empire of Christ whose relationship with the temporal British empire is often uncertain. Overall, the chapter suggests that the epic productions of the 1790s often imagined conversion as a partner of empire even as they revealed and frequently attempted to conceal the inconsistencies between them.

The Secret of England’s Greatness, Thomas Jones Barker

After having discussed the tactics of epic writing in the 1790s and early 1800s, I return to 1789 in my sixth chapter in order to examine the subversive implications of Olaudah Equiano’s anticipation of the Romantic epic revival. Although his Interesting Narrative (1789) is not an epic, it borrows several aspects of the epic form in order to associate Equiano at once with both colonizers and the colonized. Mixing epic with autobiography, conversion narrative, and travel writing, the formal liminality of Equiano’s account amplifies his presentation of himself as a hybrid figure in terms of race and religion, allowing him to promote to his readers not merely Christianity, but a broader conception of identity that challenges the conceptual basis of slavery and imperialism. Drawing on the literary resources of his colonizers’ culture, Equiano ultimately uses his position as ‘other’ to promote in his Narrative a cosmopolitan Christian identity that transcends the categories of nation and race while revealing the flaws in the discourse of both evangelism and empire.

Chapter 1 establishes a framework for understanding how the Romantic epic served as a vital literary form for addressing the tensions raised by the evangelical revival and the development of ideologies of Christian imperialism. Identifying epic poetry as an inherently conflicted genre that at once embodies reverence towards tradition and rebellion against it, the chapter investigates unique tensions in the Romantic epic that suspend it between an exterior focus influenced by the classics and an interior orientation inspired by Milton. Examining the conflicts within and between evangelism and the secular civilizing mission, the chapter argues that tensions within the epic genre make it useful for addressing similar anxieties exposed by the development of Christian imperialism.

The book concludes with a chapter that links my argument to the poetic theory and epic practice of the canonical Romantics. Situating Wordsworth’s Prelude and Byron’s Don Juan in the epic revival reveals how they participate in the trends of the period by addressing the tensions of the evangelical turn of empire. The Prelude elaborates the tradition of epic poetry that broadly affirms assumptions of British imperialism while resisting and seeking to temper its worst aspects. Don Jua, on the other hand, may be read as an extension of more subversive uses of the epic genre, attempting oppose imperialism – or at least many of its forms – by decrying the very idea of transforming others. Yet in Byron’s rejection of conversion, and in his embrace of a subjectivity made thinkable by the increasing secularization of the world, he offers an alternate path for reclaiming a sense of wholeness, one grounded in doubt and critical thought.