An important debate in modern literary criticism concerns the exact relationship between the ancient epic and the novel. Both the epic and the most ambitious modern novels are large-scale attempts to present a comprehensive view of the world through the experience of a representative hero. However, in the older tradition the hero stood for the aspirations and highest ideals of his society. The protagonist of the modern novel is usually at odds with that society, whether as exile, active rebel, or antagonistic critic. In Novel Practices, the distinguished literary scholar Eugene Goodheart surveys a representative selection of modern novelists tracing how the epic impulse has been reshaped under the conditions of modernity.

Eugene Goodheart

1. "The Licensed Trespasser": The Omniscient Narrator in Middlemarch, 2. Joyce and the Common Life, 3. Thomas Mann's Comic Spirit, 4. The Art of Ambivalence: The Good Soldier, 5. What May Knew in The Beast in the Jungle, 6. Leon Edel's Henry James, 7. Censorship and Self-Censorship in the Fiction of D. H. Lawrence, 8. Lawrence and American Fiction, 9. "Sex Consciousness" and the Novel: A Room of One's Own, 10. A Contest of Motives: T.E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 11. Character in Saul Bellow's Novels, 12. Counterlives: Philip Roth in Autobiography and Fiction, 13. Four Decades of Contemporary American Fiction, 14. Recent Novels