Publication date:
16 August 2022Publisher
Anthem PressDimensions:
229x153mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781839985485
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