The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

This book offers a comparative understanding of modernism’s most ambitious and most radical fictions. Reading a selection of works from the United States, England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Brazil, it tells the story of the development of a new type of epic in the early twentieth century. That development was, it argues, bound up with changing ideas about biological and social evolution. In this period, innovative national narratives contested social Darwinism by drawing on queer sexualities and non-progressive forms. In doing so, they help us to move beyond reductive assumptions about how humans, languages, literatures, and nations evolve.