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.
Because I Was Flesh is the story of Edward Dahlberg's life as a child and young man, and a portrait in depth of the remarkable woman, his mother Lizzie, who shaped it.
The Catcher in the Rye," written by J.D. Salinger and published in 1951, is a classic American novel that explores the themes of adolescence, alienation, and identity through the eyes of its protagonist, Holden Caulfield. The novel is set in the 1950s and follows Holden, a 16-year-old who has just been expelled from his prep school, Pencey Prep. Disillusioned with the world around him, Holden decides to leave Pencey early and spend a few days alone in New York City before returning home. Over the course of these days, Holden interacts with various people, including old friends, a former teacher, and strangers, all the while grappling with his feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction. Holden is deeply troubled by the "phoniness" of the adult world and is haunted by the death of his younger brother, Allie, which has left a lasting impact on him. He fantasizes about being "the catcher in the rye," a guardian who saves children from losing their innocence by catching them before they fall off a cliff into adulthooda. The novel ends with Holden in a mental institution, where he is being treated for a nervous breakdown. He expresses some hope for the future, indicating a possible path to recovery..
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.
Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award (1995) for Distinguished Scholarship The Long Twentieth Century traces the epochal shifts in the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Giovanni Arrighi masterfully synthesizes social theory, comparative history and historical narrative in this account of the structures and agencies which have shaped the course of world history over the millennium. Borrowing from Braudel, Arrighi argues that the history of capitalism has unfolded as a succession of "long centuries"—ages during which a hegemonic power deploying a novel combination of economic and political networks secured control over an expanding world-economic space. The modest beginnings, rise and violent unravel-ing of the links forged between capital, state power, and geopolitics by hegemonic classes and states are explored with dramatic intensity. From this perspective, Arrighi explains the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English, and finally American capitalism. The book concludes with an examination of the forces which have shaped and are now poised to undermine America's world power.
1900-1914 - 1914-1918 - The Russian revolution 1917-1921 - The Jazz age: 1921-1929 - The thirties - Fascism v. Communism 1933-1939 - World War LL 1939-1945 - The Holocaust 1933-1945 - The atomic bomb - The fifties - Communism 1945-1989 - Decolonization 1947- - Rural life - The cold war: 1945-1989 - The sixties - Civil rights 1930s -1968 - Vietnam 1964-1973 - The Middle East 1948- - Politics - The seventies - Ireland - The environment - Travel - Work - Home - Love & sex - Children and family - The individual - Oppression and exile - Crime, vice and low life - The eighties and nineties - The media - The arts - Sport and leisure - Science and technology - The collapse of communism and its consequences 1989- - Existence - Sci-fi and space - 2000-; Newsreel (C. Day Lewis).
The author describes the culture of mass death in the 20th century, from the battlefields of both World Wars to local disasters and organized famines, during which some 110 million have died.