WARRAMOU’S CURSE: EPIC, DECADENCE, AND THE COLONIAL WEST INDIES

Abstract

Despite the recent revivalof interest in the Victorian epic, poems from the colonial periphery have played only a small role in the revised narrative of the epic's persistence across the nineteenth century. Part of the explanation for this may lie in the centralized imperial geography of the archives that inspired both nineteenth-century scholars and epoists. As Adelene Buckland and Anna Vaninskaya remark, “Britain was certainly the place to be for a nineteenth-century aficionado of epic poetry” (163). While scholars flocked to Oxford, Cambridge, the British Museum, and the Bodleian Library to pour over the texts ofGilgameshor old Icelandic sagas, a number of nineteenth-century poets began to see the epic itself as a tool for excavating a more geographically and archeologically localized national story. As Simon Dentith notes, “the nationalism of the nineteenth century seized upon epics – especially the old vernacular primary epics . . . and made them an expression of the national spirit (Epic67). William Morris'sSigurd the Volsung, for example, revives the mythology of the Old North to make a “Great Story” for the race of northern Europeans what the “Tale of Troy was to the Greeks” (Dentith, “Morris” 239).