This open access book shows how epic novels after Ulysses pick up on, discuss, and transform the principle the novel develops to recover the epic's aesthetic totality for the modern novel, becoming modern epics in their own right.

How does one write something “epic”? The Epic Novel in the Ulyssean Tradition looks at the strategies employed by James Joyce in Ulysses, pursuing the classical epic's goals from within the modern novel, and posits a “Ulyssean tradition” that follows within the modern epic novel.

Dominik Steinhilber approaches questions of genre and the history of literary aesthetics by way of close readings of Ulysses (1922), Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996). Guided by the problem terms of metempsychosis, consubstantiality, and parallax, which are central to Joyce's hybridization of epic and novel, Steinhilber arrives at a discussion of a distinct model for the modern epic novel.

The Epic Novel in the Ulyssean Tradition investigates these literary questions through an approach that is attuned to both extrinsic and intrinsic pressures – and thereby traces how genre works aesthetically, yet never in a vacuum – without reducing literary aesthetics to social, historical, or political motivations alone, thereby taking art seriously in what it can tell us about itself and the world we live in.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Publication Fund of the University of Konstanz and the ZKF.