context established by his predecessors” ( 241 ). To which Russ might reply, But
what if that “larger literary tradition” is unusable? I have taken the term “gender
norm” from Susan Stanford Friedman, “Gender and Genre Anxiety,” 203–28.
5. The following discussion has also benefited from scholarship that applies
genre theory specifically to Russian poetry: Gasparov, Metr i smysl’,and Ocherk
istorii russkogo stikha;Scherr, Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme;Wachtel,
Development of Russian Verse;and Taylor, “Friendly Epistle in Russian Poetry.”
6 .Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London:
Methuen, 1982 ), 111–15; see also chapter 1 of the present volume, on the influ-
ence of Latin and neoclassicism into the nineteenth century; Wilkie, Romantic Po-
ets and Epic Tradition;Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 13.
Keats, the son of a livery stable manager and trained as a surgeon, was the one
exception.
7. Quoted in Brown, History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, 2 : 64.
Brown’s translation.
8. N. Siniavskii and M. Tsiavlovskii, eds., Pushkin v pechati, 1814–1837:
Khronologicheskii ukazatel’ proizvedenii Pushkina, napechatannykh pri ego zhizni
(Moskva: L. E. Bukhgeim, 1914 ).
9 .Various literary historians have judged other groups of genres most rep-
resentative of the Romantic era: the ballad, the elegy, and the song (Lauren
Leighton, “Romanticism,” in Handbook of Russian Literature,ed. Victor Terras,
375 ); the sonnet, the hymn, the ode, the pastoral, the romance, and the epic (Cur-
ran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism); the elegy, the idyll, and the ballad (K. N.
Girgor’ian, ed., Russkii romantizm(Leningrad: Nauka, 1978 ).
10 .The poema is described as a “verse epic” in Terras, Handbook of Russian Lit-
erature, 344. On the descent of the ballad from the epic, see note 32.
11. The women Friedman discusses include Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
H.D., Mary Tighe, and Diane de Prima. Paula Feldman lists seven eighteenth-
century British women who wrote epics (Feldman, introduction to British
Women Poets of the Romantic Era,xxx n. 4 ).
In Russia, Zinaida Volkonskaia is the only woman who wrote a work that re-
sembles an epic; her posthumously published Skazanie ob Olge(Paris: V. Gasper,
1865 ), a Walter Scott–like novel, focuses on the marriage and events leading up
to the conversion to Christianity of Ol’ga, the legendary figure in the Primary
Chronicles.
Women did figure as bogatyry(epic heroes) and polianitsy(Amazons) in a few
early byliny(Russian folk epics). See Natalie Kononenko, “Women as Perform-
ers of Oral Literature: A Reexamination of Epic and Lament,” in Women Writers
in Russian Literature,ed. Toby Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1994 ), 19.
12 .Stuart Curran writes of Blake’s “creation of the artist as epic hero” (Po-
etic Form and British Romanticism, 175 ), a tendency continued in Wordsworth’s
Preludeand in other Romantic works. Similarly, Susan Friedman discusses lyric
poems by Romantic poets that constitute “personal epics” (“Gender and Genre
Anxiety,” 224 n. 15 ).
13 .Two noteworthy exceptions to male protagonists in epics are Robert
Southey’s Joan of Arc( 1796 ), discussed in chapter 6 , and Shelley’s Queen Mab
Notes to Pages 59–61 243