Epic after Evolution: Modernism's National Narratives

FAIN: HB-232154-16

Vaclav Paris
City College of New York (New York, NY 10016-4309)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on selected works of early 20th-century modernist prose and their relationship to national identity, treating examples in English, Portuguese, and Czech.

Epic after Evolution is a book project that tells the history of the modernist epic from 1900 to 1930. Although recent work in transnational modernist studies suggests that modernism can be understood as a global phenomenon, my book points out that many of the founding narratives of modernist prose are nation-specific. Studying five such texts in detail, Epic after Evolution places modernist epic back into its local contexts. In doing so, however, it also proposes a more general common feature of the genre: namely that modernist national epics of this period all explore alternatives to biological, racial, or ethnic modes of defining and narrating nationality. Discussing the ramifications of this finding, my book models a way of studying modernist epic within and without national canons. During the period of my grant, I will complete two chapters for this book and submit them both to peer-reviewed journals.

Associated Products

Beginning Again with Modernist Epic (Article)
Title: Beginning Again with Modernist Epic
Author: Vaclav Paris
Abstract: n his 1978 book, On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson famously claimed that “the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.”[2] His idea, which has since given rise to a field of sociobiology called “Epic of Evolution,” is that human beings have a primal need for explanations of their existence and cosmic order, a need better served by evolutionary science than religion or literature. Although many critics have objected to Wilson’s position, pointing out its misreadings of Darwinism, its male bias, its ethnocentrism, and its naturalization of an implicitly heteronormative reproductive sexuality, his claim retains its power, almost forty years later, as a description of how deeply the evolutionary imaginary has assumed the role of a cultural foundation narrative in late (western) modernity.[3] The once literary terms “epic” and “myth” have been colonized—at least in secular consciousness—by the more scientific “evolution.”
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/beginning-again-modernist-epic
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Modernism/ Modernity
Publisher: JHU

Spotlight on the Humanities and Arts (Web Resource)
Title: Spotlight on the Humanities and Arts
Author: Vaclav Paris
Abstract: An interview about my NEH award.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/humanities/creativity-and-research-in-progress

The Evolutions of Modernist Epic (Book)
Title: The Evolutions of Modernist Epic
Author: Václav Paris
Abstract: Modernist epic is more interesting and more diverse than we have supposed. As a radical form of national fiction it appeared in many parts of the world in the early twentieth century. Reading a selection of works from the United States, England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Brazil, The Evolutions of Modernist Epic develops a comparative theory of this genre and its global development. That development was, it argues, bound up with new ideas about biological evolution. During the first decades of the twentieth century—a period known, in the history of evolutionary science, as 'the eclipse of Darwinism'—evolution's significance was questioned, rethought, and ultimately confined to the Neo-Darwinist discourse with which we are familiar today. Epic fiction participated in, and was shaped by, this shift. Drawing on queer forms of sexuality to cultivate anti-heroic and non-progressive modes of telling national stories, the genre contested reductive and reactionary forms of social Darwinism. The book describes how, in doing so, the genre asks us to revisit our assumptions about ethnolinguistics and organic nationalism. It also models how the history of evolutionary thought can provide a new basis for comparing diverse modernisms and their peculiar nativisms.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-evolutions-of-modernist-epic-9780198868217?cc=es&lang=en&
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198868217
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Nature of Comparison: Macunaima and Orlando (Article)
Title: The Nature of Comparison: Macunaima and Orlando
Author: Václav Paris
Abstract: Dominant modes for comparing modernist literatures do so by coordinating individual texts against a larger narrative of modernity conceived as economic or political globalization. This article proposes an alternative premise for comparison. Instead of focusing on development, it considers the ways in which different national modernisms registered a changing modernity in terms of nature and natural history. This switch is demanded by two texts that bear a number of thematic and conceptual similarities and were published months apart in 1928: Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando. Both works rethink Darwinism’s import for national representation by adapting the genre of the national romance or prose epic. They come to offer a sense of nations as living or organic in queer and unexpected ways. Tracing this process in relation also to the context of rising fascism, the article sheds light on modernist views of nature and their heuristic value as a basis for comparison.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_pubs/817/
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Comparative Literature Studies
Publisher: Penn State University Press

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