'I have called my poem historical, not epic, ' John Dryden explained in the dedication to his panegyric Annus Mirabilis, 'though both the actions and actors are as much heroic, as any poem can contain.'While it's unlikely that any critic today would class Annus Mirabilis with Paradise Lost and the Iliad, it seems remarkable that the poem's other purposeits role as 'an historical poem'has so sharply receded from view. Historical Literatures recovers the forgotten historiographical element in works like Dryden's, surveying some of the many different forms in which Restoration and...

'I have called my poem historical, not epic, ' John Dryden explained in the dedication to his panegyric Annus Mirabilis, 'though both the actions and actors are as much heroic, as any poem can contain.'While it's unlikely that any critic today would class Annus Mirabilis with Paradise Lost and the Iliad, it seems remarkable that the poem's other purpose-its role as 'an historical poem'-has so sharply receded from view. Historical Literatures recovers the forgotten historiographical element in works like Dryden's, surveying some of the many different forms in which Restoration and...