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FEW GENRES in English literary history are more marked by the revolution of modernism than the epic. Epic, around 1900, was chiefly an archaic form, material for antiquarians such as William Morris, Alfred Noyes, and Charles Doughty. By 1922, however, the dominant idea of epic had become more about "making it new" than making it old. For Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot it was a polyphonic, fragmentary, encyclopedic genre.1 It was also, in contrast to its reactionary predecessor, an inclusive or cosmopolitan form. Where epic in the nineteenth century was conceived, as Pascale Casanova has suggested, to be a medium for national competition-serving to show the greater antiquity, larger claim to cultural capital, and superior progress of a given people2-Ulysses, The Waste Land, and The Cantos rethink nationalism: attempting, among other things, to join traditions in a new transcultural koiné. Ulysses is, in this sense, "an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish)"3 where "Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet."4
In other genres, modernist studies has moved away from the theoretical model of a rift towards recognizing continuities between the modernists and their Victorian forebears. With epic, however, as Herbert Tucker has pointed out, a "drastic historical severance" remains in place, the Great War marking an insuperable watershed in the genre. Tucker himself has exhaustively studied the rich traditions of nineteenth-century and Edwardian epic as a corrective to this severance, aiming to show that modernism had a more complex, dialectical engagement with past epoists than previously imagined.5 This article attempts a related objective, not so much of smoothing over the rift, but of problematizing it. Instead of offering a survey of the genre in this period, this discussion focuses on a single text as a node in which residual and emergent ideas of epic come together: T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph.
Lawrence's book is a good candidate for this straddling of epic for a number of reasons. Although the earliest printed version dates to 1922 and the full text to 1926, Seven Pillars of Wisdom reads-at least at first sight-much more like a heroic epic of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, although it is supposedly a historical account of the author's involvement in the Arab Revolt during the Great War, its...