Epic voices

Robert Arlett

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 confront the simultaneous inner and outer impulses of contemporary experience with textures reflecting the interactive relationships of those impulses and that exhibit experimentation in form as they cut back and forth in perspectives, perhaps reaching for fusion of normally distinct narrative voices.