Reconsidering Moretti’s “rhetoric of innocence”: Ambivalence Toward and Rationalizations of Heroic Violence in Contemporary Epic

Abstract: A characteristic trope of the twentieth-century “modern” epic was a reimagination of the genre to suppress conventional heroes and battles. Such reluctance to celebrate wars among the literary intelligentsia was particularly typical of the West in the wake of two World Wars. Perhaps the text most exemplary of this shift from martial subjects to depictions of the commonplace was James Joyce’s prose epic, Ulysses . This diffidence toward heroic violence and Joyce’s influence has remained a trope of recent epic, for instance in Derek Walcott’s celebrated Omeros . However, the popularity of the quotidian epic has also occasioned deliberate revivals of the earlier, martial subject matter. Nicholas Hagger’s Overlord , wherein violence is rationalized in the greater cause of a united world at peace, may represent a significant effort at resurrecting heroic epic in opposition to the dominant trend. In contrast, Michael Lind’s Alamo— although a formally tenable regional epic—serves as a cautionary illustration of the risk of bellicosity to which writers of battle epics inevitably expose themselves.