Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. 336 pp. $22.97.Edward Adams argues in Liberal Epic that epics, defined by their emphasis on graphic combat scenes between heroes and the valorization of war, were liberalized and sanitized in poems, histories, and historical novels throughout the long nineteenth century. His oxymoronic (273) subject is to trace the representational and ideological dilemma of [Victorian writers'] effort to celebrate both murderous heroic power and liberal (8). Adams strives to identify this move by the entwining of two terms or notions, liberal and epic, one associated with progress, humanity, and self-determination and the other with tradition, war, and violent domination (19).One way to imagine this evolution is to compare the origins of Chinese martial arts rooted in necessity to the present-day acrobatic, flying, floating, stylized Wushu fighting in Ang Lee's celebrated film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Figuratively similar to the warriors in the film, Adams appears to leap effortlessly across rooftops, to glide over water without leaving a ripple, and to dance nimbly on the tops of bamboo trees. The book's pace and sweep leaves the reader breathless at how quickly he travels from Homer's Iliad to John Romero's DOOM (a first-person shooter video game).Aside from his major analyses of nineteenth-century historical writing, Adams also provides tantalizing peeks into disparate works such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), John Keegan's military histories, Samuel von Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672), and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998)-all in three hundred pages or so. It inspires at once exhilaration, but also a touch of incredulity. And perhaps any skepticism results at least in part from the kind of narrowness that can be bred in the academy, with its sometimes stifling emphasis on specialization. An ambitious work such as this one can fall prey to knee-jerk suspicion. Liberal Epic is made of far sterner stuff and Adams has big ideas about big books and he is intrepid and relentless in advancing his thesis rather in the manner of a Pickett's Charge.There are many reasons to rejoice, not least because Adams breathes new life into books that were in their day bestsellers, but that now lead a more or less moribund scholarly existence such as Scott's Napoleon (1827), Creasy's Battles (1851), Carlyle's Frederick (1858-65), and Churchill's Marlborough (1934-38). In Liberal Epic Adams also considers seriously the work of professional historians whose writing demonstrates his thesis, such as G. M. Trevelyan and C. V. Wedgwood. The volume is highly suggestive in interdisciplinary ways, in particular when Adams makes sometimes oblique but always intriguing connections to the writings of Grotius and John Locke, to the influence of David Hume and Francois Fenelon, to the economic vision of Adam Smith, and to the modern political thought of Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, John Rawls, and Michael Walzer.Although he espouses a proposition about the softening (205) of Victorian epic under the spell of Gibbon, which he discerns in the movement from Homeric killing to Popeian dying (166), Adams clearly does not mean the work to be ponderously theoretical. He displays his wit throughout and has an eye for irony. There are occasional nods to theory and engagement with critical thinkers, but the real work is done by Adams himself in attempting to trace the often subtle contours (see his chapter on William Morris) and the evolutionary development of the tendency he identifies, namely, the emptying out of violent heroism in liberal epic's modern battle scenes (173). Adams renders Liberal Epic pliable enough to address literary scholars and historiographers. It is in the latter field that the book makes a needed and signal contribution. …