Twentieth Century Epic Novels

Every age that has produced literary epics has also produced variations on the elements that constitute the epic. 'Twentieth-Century Epic Novels' examines the most popular 20th-century manifestations of epic sensibilities by looking closely at five major examples of the 20th-century epic novel.

Every age that has produced literary epics has also produced variations on the elements that constitute the epic. 'Twentieth-Century Epic Novels' examines the most popular 20th-century manifestations of epic sensibilities by looking closely at five major examples of the 20th-century epic novel.

Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion. In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll. East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.

Examines the epic qualities of novels written by Hemingway, Norris, Steinbeck, Bellow, and Ellison.

'A brilliant and beautiful book which wrestles with the scope and ache of lineage, the origin and myth and making of ourselves' - Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions 'Unlike almost anything I've read - so alive it seems to squirm to the touch' - Will Harris, author of RENDANG, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection What does it mean to be a person of multitudinous countries and heritages? Amnion excavates migratory histories, colonialism and class, moving from England to France, the United States, Spain, Germany, Libya and the Philippines. In this chronicle of a family's history divided by geography and language, Stephanie Sy-Quia explores the reverberations that the actions of one generation can have on the next, through acts of bravery and resistance, great and small. Simultaneously mapping and undoing ideas of the self, everything here is contested. Undefinable in form, combining aspects of fiction, epic poetry and the lyric essay, and merging classical thought and contemporary life to show the joy in living and art, Amnion's broad intellect and undulating emotional landscape is a testament to the families we are given and those that we choose. A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION 'Kaleidoscopic... A powerful, hybrid song charged with ferocity and fragility' - the Guardian

In Russian history, the twentieth century was an era of unprecedented, radical transformations - changes in social systems, political regimes, and economic structures. A number of distinctive literary schools emerged, each with their own voice, specific artistic character, and ideological background. As a single-volume compendium, the Companion provides a new perspective on Russian literary and cultural development, as it unifies both émigré literature and literature written in Russia. This volume concentrates on broad, complex, and diverse sources - from symbolism and revolutionary avant-garde writings to Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet prose, poetry, drama, and émigré literature, with forays into film, theatre, and literary policies, institutions and theories. The contributors present recent scholarship on historical and cultural contexts of twentieth-century literary development, and situate the most influential individual authors within these contexts, including Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov and Anna Akhmatova.

An overview of the main literary schools, authors and works in modern Russia and the Soviet Union.