ADELINE JOHNS-PUTRA is Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Heroes and Housewives: Women's Epic Poetry and Domestic Ideology in the Romantic Age (2001), and has also published articles on gender and genre in the Romantic age.

• Acknowledgements Glossary Introduction: What is the Epic? The Classical Age: Beginnings The Middle Ages and Renaissance: Epic in the Christian Era The Eighteenth Century: Epic in a Modern World The Nineteenth Century: Epic and the Self The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Modernist Epic The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Epic Film Further Reading Index