1st Edition

The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo

By Catherine Morley Copyright 2009
    226 Pages
    by Routledge

    226 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    Chapter One: Theoretical and Generic Considerations

    Chapter Two: A Transnational Inheritance: Joycean and American Ancestry

    Chapter Three: The Bard of Everyday Domesticity: John Updike’s Song of America

    Chapter Four: Transnational Paternalisms: Philip Roth’s Post-Pastoral American Epic

    Chapter Five: Don DeLillo’s Underworld as Recycled American Epic

    Conclusion: New American Vistas

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Biography

    Catherine Morley is the Academic Fellow in the Cultures of Modernism at Oxford Brookes University. She has recently published a co-edited collection of essays, American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century, and is currently working on Modern American Fiction. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Comparative American Studies, English, and the Journal of American Studies.

    "This intellectually sophisticated book considers three major novelists, each of whom has produced a large body of significant work that has received extensive critical attention...Recommended."

    -- Choice, June 2009