The Eighteenth Century: Epic in the Modern World

Abstract

The century or so after the appearance of Paradise Lost witnessed two significant developments in the epic tradition. The first is the tendency of poets such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope away from straightforward epic attempts towards related endeavours, namely, epic translation and mockepic. Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid appeared in 1697. Pope worked for ten years on his translation of the Iliad, which appeared in six volumes between 1715 and 1720, and for three years collaborated on the Odyssey, which appeared in five volumes (1725–6). Both poets also produced mockheroic or shorter heroic poetry — Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and Mac Flecknoe (1682), and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712-14) and The Dunciad (1728–42). The second, later development in the epic is the emergence of what Henry Fielding labelled the ‘comic epic in prose’, referring to his own Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). Alongside Fielding’s ‘comic epics’ may be read Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751).