Epic Ambitions in Modern Times examines how artists, in various forms and media, have reinvented the epic in the past three centuries.

List of Figures; Acknowledgments; Chapter One Whatever Happened to the Epic?, [Introduction to the fate of epic in the past three centuries and the influence of Milton]; Chapter Two Leaving Paradise, [The final books of Paradise Lost and the end of an epic tradition]; Chapter Three An Epic Told in Letters, [The migration of epic to the novel in Richardson's Clarissa]; Chapter Four Prospects and Living Pictures, [Epic history-writing in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]; Chapter Five Analyzing a Soul, [Wordsworth's Prelude and Autobiographical Epic]; Chapter Six Epic Heroinism, [The Icelandic Völsunga Saga and Wagner's Ring]; Chapter Seven Cinematic Spectacle and the Hero, [The epic in film: Hollywood in the 1960s, and Abel Gance's silent Napoléon]; Chapter Eight Paradise Sought: The African American Odyssey, [The Great Migration in memoir, poetry, fiction and Jacob Lawrence's paintings]; Chapter Nine Imaginary History and Epic Fantasy, [Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion]; Chapter Ten The Epic in Future Tense, [Frederick Turner's three epic poems: The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse]; Chapter Eleven Eleven Heaven and Hell Reimagined, [Tony Kushner's Angels in America]; Chapter Twelve Translating and Recentering Old Epics, [Contemporary translations of ancient epics and fictional adaptations by Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, Madeline Miller, Maria Dahvana Headley]; Index