Genre-splicing: Epic and Novel Hybrids in Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" and "American Gods".

I propose that Neil Gaiman's graphic novel series The Sandman and his novel American Gods splices together the epic and the novel to create assymetrical generic hybrids for representing alterity in the globalized postmodern world: The Sandman privileges the epic, while American Gods favours the novel. The Sandman attempts to accommodate the multiplicities associated with the novel within the universalizing framework of the epic, creating an uplifting epic for a novelistic world. American Gods presents the seeming unity of the epic only to show the inequalities generated by trying to assimilate novelistic diversity, and so American Gods acts as the criticizing novelization of epics. In my first chapter, I examine how the mythology-based world systems of the two works demonstrate Gaiman's differing ideologies. In my second chapter, I analyze how Gaiman's generic hybrids respond to the challenge of representing the Middle East in the context of Orientalism.