Novels, we say, are long prose fictions, but general the terms of that definition are left unexamined. What is “prose” after all? What, Catherine Gallagher wants to ask, is fiction? And how did fictionality become established as the matter-of-factly defining characteristic of the novel. It is often assumed that “fiction” is a tool always already available in everyone’s mental toolkit, but Gallagher suggests that “there is mounting historical evidence for the . . . proposition that the novel discovered fiction.”... Read more

Several of my recent posts were taken from essays in Franco Moretti’s recent collection, The Novel (Princeton). The two-volume English translation abridges the six volumes of the Italian original. The essays are so suggestive that one is tempted to take some time off to learn Italian. Read more

During the sixteenth century, a little before the novel took shape in Western Europe, a very similar form of prose fiction was being developed in China. According to Andrew Plaks, “The significant areas of convergence between what we customarily call the classical novel in China and its namesake in Europe are not confined to one or two points of resemblance – as is perhaps the case when one describes parallels of a similar nature in Tokugawa Japan, for example. Rather,... Read more

Greek novels appear in the late Hellenistic period. One scholar suggests the “typical” Greek novel followed something like the following story-line: “These are novels of travel, adventure, and romantic love, taking place in a vaguely realistic Mediterranean or Near Eastern setting. A boy and a girl, both exceptionally attractive and of noble birth, meet and fall in love. A cruel fate separates them, and they are tossed around by land and sea, constantly longing and search for one another .... Read more

Goody asks why it took so long for the novel form to develop in Europe. If it’s simply a matter of a shift from oral to written, or the technology of printing, that was all in place centuries before the novel took recognizable form. He argues that the main obstacle to its earlier rise had to do with the problem of fictionality. The scarcity of long fictional narratives “is related to the inherent problem of representations of all kinds pointed... Read more

Goody asks why it took so long for the novel form to develop in Europe. If it’s simply a matter of a shift from oral to written, or the technology of printing, that was all in place centuries before the novel took recognizable form. He argues that the main obstacle to its earlier rise had to do with the problem of fictionality. The scarcity of long fictional narratives “is related to the inherent problem of representations of all kinds pointed... Read more