Ralph Rader on the Literary History of the Novel

Narrative ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of

Chivalric Romance and Novella Collections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter argues that the sixteenth-century novella collection and chivalric romance have much in common. However, their length, status as translations, and multiple authorships have rendered their comparison difficult and have limited their role in studies of pre-novelistic fiction until relatively recently. The chapter characterizes their relationship as ‘rhetorical’, because consideration of the two genres has long been dictated by their staged opposition in the traditional, dualistic narrative of the novel's origin. This narrative imagines a struggle between the past-ness and absurdities of romance and the present-ness and realism of the novel as anticipated in the early modern novella and the closely related picaresque tale. Hence, they possess an interlocking yet uncomfortable — even antagonistic — rhetorical relationship in the literary history of the novel in English.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Foltz
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
History Of

The current notion of the “death of the novel” is a midcentury construction at once inherited from modernism and designed to obscure the novel’s affinity with new forms of moving image storytelling. Against this critical rubric, I suggest that contemporary literary history is already enmeshed in a history of evolving media—which is to say, an ongoing record of generic distress. There has not been only one death of the novel, stretched out over a century from modernism to the present; for the “death of the novel” is not a historical event. The literary history of the novel after film cannot be drawn in a straight line, in part because that history is not simply literary in nature. What has it meant for writers to discover that film and television may no longer be conceived as media foreign to the novel but are instead crucial pieces of its “hideous furniture”?

The Arabic Novel and History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Allen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between the Arabic novel and history within the context of the Arabic-speaking world, and in particular the process of producing a literary history of the novel genre written in Arabic. It first considers the early development of the novel genre in Arabic as part of a cultural movement that gained impetus in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the interplay of two cultural forces: the importation of Western ideas (including literary genres) and the role of the premodern Arab-Islamic cultural heritage in each subregion. It then discusses examples of narrative from the premodern heritage of Arabic literature before turning to the history of the Arabic novel. The chapter also presents examples of the Arabic historical novel, one of which is Sālim Ḥimmīsh’s Al-‘Allāma (2001, The Polymath).

Inventing the Novel

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Bracht Branham
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Menippean Satire ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
I And Thou ◽  
History Of

Bakhtin as a philosopher and a student of the novel is intent upon the novel’s role in the history of consciousness. His project fails if he is wrong about the dialogic nature of consciousness or the cultural centrality of the novel as the only discourse that can model human consciousness and its intersubjective character. Inventing the Novel is an argument in four stages: the Introduction surveys Bakhtin’s life and his theoretical work in the 1920s, which grounded his work on the novel, as investigated in following chapters. Chapter 1 sketches Bakhtin’s view of literary history as an agonistic dialogue of genres, concluding with his claim that the novel originates as a new way of evaluating time. Chapter 2 explores Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes: how do forms of time and space in ancient fiction delimit the possible representation of the human? Chapter 3 assesses Bakhtin’s poetics of genre in his account of Menippean satire as crucial in the history of the novel. Chapter 4 uses Petronius to address the prosaics of the novel, exploring Bakhtin’s account of how novelists of “the second stylistic line” orchestrate the babble of voices expressive of an era into “a microcosm of heteroglossia,” focusing it through the consciousness of characters “on the boundary” between I and thou. Insofar as this analysis succeeds, it evinces the truth of Bakhtin’s claim that the role of Petronius’s Satyrica in the history of the novel is “immense.”

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of

This book explores the history of English-language prose fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, focusing not only on the ‘literary’ novel, but also on the processes of production, distribution and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as the work of major novelists, movements, and tendencies. After World War II, the rise of cultural nationalism in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and movements towards independence in the Pacific islands, together with the turn toward multiculturalism and transnationalism in the postcolonial world, called into question the standard national frames for literary history. This resulted in an increasing recognition of formerly marginalised peoples and a repositioning of these national literatures in a world literary context. The book explores the implications of such radical change through its focus on the English-language novel and the short story, which model the crises in evolving narratives of nationhood and the reinvention of postcolonial identities. Shifting socio-political and cultural contexts and their effects on novels and novelists, together with shifts in fictional modes (realism, modernism, the Gothic, postmodernism) are traced across these different regions. Attention is given not only to major authors but also to Indigenous and multicultural fiction, children's and young adult novels, and popular fiction. Chapters on book publishing, critical reception, and literary histories for all four areas are included in this innovative presentation of a Trans-Pacific postcolonial history of the novel.

The Rise of the ‘Rise’ of the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Siskin
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Very Old ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Medium

This concluding chapter argues that the rise of the novel has been one of the most widely circulated narratives in the study of literature. However, when one tracks the rise of that rise, a very old and a very straightforward reason comes into view: literature as a category to study was itself put into circulation by novelism. The eighteenth century's extensive discourse of and about the novel was a primary medium not only for that genre but also for literature's own rise. That is why, 200 years later, The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OHNE) matters, even for those with other generic predilections: a new history of the novel will be a necessary tool for anyone attempting to write a genuinely new literary history.

Reading Statelessness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the failure of human rights to address statelessness is well known. Less commented upon is how important literature was to her thought. This chapter shows how Arendt’s 1940s essays on Kafka connect the history of the novel to shifting definitions of legal and political sovereignty. Arendt reads The Castle as a blueprint for a political theory that is also a theory of fiction: in the novel K, the unwanted stranger, demolishes the fiction of the rights of man, and with it, the fantasy of assimilation. In a parallel move, Kafka also refuses to assimilate his character into the conventions of fiction. Arendt’s reading changes the terms for how we might approach the literature of exile and of human rights.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

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