The war histories of Winston Churchill, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, were heroic histories in the tradition of the liberal epic that extends back through Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England (1846-61), Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), and Alexander Pope's commentary-translation of Homer's Iliad. So argues Adams (English, Washington and Lee U.), who further seeks to show where Churchill shared the distinctive features of all liberal epics; apologetic strategies for justifying wars as worthy exceptions to a general rule and concerted efforts to limit or sanitize the public's access to graphic representations of soldiers' acts of violence and domination (although in places Churchill departs from these features). Another goal of Adams is to rescue the genre of the liberal epic from what he describes as critical neglect. Annotation 2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
