A Schema for Artorius : History, John Heath-Stubbs, and the Last Modernist Epic

Although John Heath-Stubbs’s long modernist epic Artorius is largely unknown, this ambitious text combines a cyclical vision of history with a linear one on its way to understanding Great Britain’s loss of imperial status. If this point has generally been missed, the complexity of Heath-Stubbs’s multiple symbolic superstructures partly accounts for the text’s unfortunate reception. Accordingly, I present an explanatory schema for Artorius in line with what other modernist texts – most famously Joyce’s Ulysses – have benefitted from. Besides unpacking the symbolic superstructures used by Heath-Stubbs, I also address how the poet, who lived in Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis, uses them to answer a British nation that can no longer identify as a global power.