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Epic Ambitions in Modern Times explores how artists in varied genres and media have aimed for, in Milton’s phrase, ”things unattempted yet” in epic creation. Starting with the last books of Paradise Lostas a farewell to the ancient tradition of epic and extending to an assessment of four twenty-first-century women writers retelling canonical epics in the voices of marginalized characters, the book’s intervening chapters consider epic in the forms of an epistolary novel, a work of history, a poetic autobiography, an opera, a silent film, a series of paintings, two literary fantasies, three poems set in the future and a play.
Writing for a broad audience, this veteran college teacher provides attractive introductory accounts of, among multiple other works, Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1748), Gibbon’s history Decline and Fall (completed in 1789), Wagner’s massive operatic Ring (1876), Abel Gance’s film Napoleon (1927), Tony Kushner’s celebrated drama Angels in America (1991), and Frederick Turner’s futuristic science fiction verse epics. Particularly effective is the illustrated chapter devoted to Jacob Lawrence’s 60 small panel paintings The Migration Series (half of which are in the Phillips Collection [DC], the other half in New York City's Museum of Modern Art). This fine chapter (among others) will reward nonspecialists and teachers seeking new ways of satisfying impulses once served by the classical form. --CHOICE
List of Figures; Acknowledgments; Chapter One Whatever Happened to the Epic?, [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]; Chapter Two Leaving Paradise, [The final books of Paradise Lost and the end of an epic tradition]; Chapter Three An Epic Told in Letters, [The migration of epic to the novel in Richardson’s Clarissa]; Chapter Four Prospects and Living Pictures, [Epic history-writing in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]; Chapter Five Analyzing a Soul, [Wordsworth’s Prelude and Autobiographical Epic]; Chapter Six Epic Heroinism, [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner’s Ring]; Chapter Seven Cinematic Spectacle and the Hero, [The epic in film: Hollywood in the 1960s, and Abel Gance’s silent Napoléon]; Chapter Eight Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey, [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings]; Chapter Nine Imaginary History and Epic Fantasy, [Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion]; Chapter Ten The Epic in Future Tense, [Frederick Turner’s three epic poems: The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse]; Chapter Eleven Eleven Heaven and Hell Reimagined, [Tony Kushner’s Angels in America]; Chapter Twelve Translating and Recentering Old Epics, [Contemporary translations of ancient epics and fictional adaptations by Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, Madeline Miller, Maria Dahvana Headley]; Index