Young, Michael. “History as Myth: Charles Kingsley's
Hereward
the Wake,” Studies in the Novel Vol. XVII, No. 2 (Summer 1985):
174-188.
Young considers Hereward the Wake to be a work of “secular scripture”.
Its aim “is to assert, after the fact, the inevitability of Britain’s rise
through history to the status of preeminent world power; to confirm the
rightness of this rise; to confer authority on it by linking it both by
secular precedent and divine origin; and to project it onto a limitless
future by presenting the embodiment of the national enterprise, the empire,
as prefiguring the millennium, reunifying the divine and the secular” (174).
Hereward
the Wake; History;
History
as Myth. |
