The Historical Poem takes up Georg Lukács's classic account of the historical novel to tell the forgotten story of its precursors. For eighteenth-century and Romantic thinkers, these were poems from distant times and places—from ancient and medieval India to the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages. Historical poems were said to bring the past to life, to invite their readers into distant worlds. And they were made to answer many of the era's most pressing philosophical questions: the nature of human thought, the origin of human civilizations, the formation—and, for some, the hierarchy—of races.

In this wide-ranging and innovative study, Joel Childers traces what he calls enterpretation, a hermeneutics of inhabitation and historical feeling. At a time of rapid imperial expansion, Childers shows how enterpretation was used to conceive of a newly human history—an account of the peopling of the globe as an uneven process of migration, conquest, and settlement.

At once a literary history and a critical intervention, The Historical Poem combines a detailed study of Romantic thought with chapters on twentieth-century and contemporary literary criticism by Fredric Jameson, Saidiya Hartman, and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, among others.