The Evolutions of Modernist Epic.

In The Evolutions of Modernist Epic, Václav Paris "reread[s] literary modernism through a comparative perspective that includes the history of science" (9). Specifically, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jaroslav Hašek, Mário de Andrade, and Virginia Woolf "experimented with national epic precisely as a space for problematizing and reimagining social Darwinism" (9). The texts and writers covered are uniquely positioned in their historical moment to challenge social Darwinism, via the modernist epic. They do so through "non-normative sexuality" (32), challenges to "patriarchal history" (44), "Atavism" (70), "survival of the unfittest" (13), and by offering a revisionist genealogy, among other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]