Epic voices

Epic Voices is an assessment of the major achievement of contemporary American and British fiction: what author Robert Arlett terms the contemporary epic novel. The path of the modern novel has been marked by a dialectic of seemingly rival impulses: while certain novelists have sought to deal with wide-scale social and political dimensions of modern existence, others have concerned themselves primarily with interior sensibility. This book examines a group of novels - written on both sides of the North Atlantic within a period covering approximately the early 1960s through the mid-1970s - that…