Book excerpt: Elaine Safer's critically acclaimed work analyzes how 20th century epic writers make ironic use of traditional themes and patterns to develop a new genre, the American comic epic novel. Illustrating practical criticism at its best, the book closely scrutinizes six modern comic novels from John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis , and Ken Kesey. Safer supports her study with a firm grasp of the English epic of John Milton, the American epics of Cotton Mather and Walt Whitman, and the comic tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Fielding. Her examination allows the modern American absurdist novel to be seen within a tradition and yet as distinctively modern. In addition, the book provides a clear and wide-ranging theoretical framework for the absurd and for black humor, terms too loosely defined in the past.