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Epic Ambitions in Modern Times seeks neither to be a comprehensive history of the modern epic nor to construct a theoretical framework for understanding how epics work. Its twelve chapters range from a consideration of the final books of Paradise Lost to an assessment of a quartet of twenty-first-century women writers who have retold the ancient epics in the form of novels voiced by marginal characters in the original poems. Between those goalposts the book takes up 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 long poems set in science-fictional futures, and a play.
The book explores how artists in the past three centuries, working in varied forms and media, have aimed for, in Milton's phrase, 'things unattempted yet' in epic creation. The ambition of artists to produce epic and the persistent desire of audiences for epic experience constitute the alternating current that stimulates the analysis of the representative selection of modern epics.
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