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McKeon's dissections are often breathtaking... [his] anthology is solid, commandingly centered,... superbly energetic and uniquely powerful.
As comprehensive an account of the genre as you could wish. What a marvelous collection and what a skillful editor McKeon is, marshalling the essays into an argument for the novel as a distinct 'literary historical genre' rather than as one element in a bland, all-embracing narrative theory... The outstanding feature of this fine collection is its firm commitment to the art of the novelist. Throughout, there is a profound recognition of the novel's ability to criticise the existing order, to create new and compelling worlds, to extend our grammar and enlarge our vocabulary for coping with the great dramas of life, love, death and the shoelace snapping when you are late for work.
The anthology provides not only a splendid guide to thinking about the novel, but also a useful warning against assuming that fiction is merely the instrument of those who wish to dampen revolution, forge national identities, and build empires.
This breathtaking comprehensive collection of essays... is an amazingly ambitious project... McKeon has provided us with an invaluable map of the theoretical and literary-historical landscape surrounding the origins, theories, and developments of the novel.
This is a richly stimulating volume, an invaluable resource and challenging intervention for all serious researchers into the novel.
As a teaching text this anthology can hardly be bettered.
This collection of essays will be the anthology for all introductory courses on the novel. The approach through genre theory and history is refreshing, welcome, and long overdue.
By juxtaposing the classic theoretical texts with recent work ranging from film and cultural studies to postcoloniality and postmodernism, this rich collection places the 'theory of the novel' squarely back on the agenda of contemporary literary and cultural research.
Michael McKeon may be the only person in the world capable of bringing together sensibly so many positions on so complicated a topic. The selections are judicious and raise most of the issues—theoretical, historical, global—that a twenty-first century book on this topic requires, and McKeon's own commentary is erudite, cogent, and accessible.
The Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach organizes the study of the novel into a coherent intellectual field. What sets this volume apart from its competitors are McKeon's introductory materials, which develop an original and sophisticated historical argument about the genre. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the novel, in genre theory, or in historical analysis. The collection does for the novel in general what The Origins of the English Novel did for its early history. It also reinforces McKeon's position as our premier historian of the genre.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.5
x 10
Pages
968
ISBN
9780801863974
Illustration Description
2 line drawings
Table of Contents
Part I: Genre Theory
E. D. Hirsch, from Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays
Claudio Guillén, from Validity in Interpretation
Claudio Guillén, from Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary
Part I: Genre Theory
E. D. Hirsch, from Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays
Claudio Guillén, from Validity in Interpretation
Claudio Guillén, from Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History
Jonathan Culler, "Toward a Theory of Non-Genre Literature"
Marthe Robert, from Origins of the Novel
Part II: The Novel as Displacement I: Structuralism
Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"
Claude Lévi-Strauss, from The Savage Mind, from The Origin of Table Manners, "How Myths Die," from The Naked Man
Northrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, from Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, from The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
Part III: The Novel as Displacement II: Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams, "Family Romances"
Marthe Robert, from Origins of the Novel
Part IV: Grand Theory I
Georg Lukács, from The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, from The Historical Novel
Part V: Grand Theory II
José Ortega y Gasset, from Meditations on Quixote, "Notes on the Novel"
Part VI: Grand Theory III
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, from The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
Part VII: Revisionist Grand Theory
Ian Watt, from The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding
Michael McKeon, "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel"
Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Part VIII: Privacy, Domesticity, Women
Ian Watt, from The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding
Nancy Armstrong, from Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
Gillian Brown, from Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America
Part IX: Subjectivity, Character, Development
Dorrit Cohn, from Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction
Ann Banfield, from Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, "Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals"
Franco Moretti, from The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture
Clifford Siskin, from The Historicity of Romantic Discourse
Part X: Realism
Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, from Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject
Michael McKeon, from "Prose Fiction: Great Britain"
George Levine, from The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley
Michael Davitt Bell, from The Development of American Romance
Part XI: Photography, Film, and the Novel
Henry James, from "Preface to The Golden Bowl"
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange
André Bazin, "In Defense of Mixed Cinema"
Part XII: Modernism
Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"
Georg Lukács, from Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle
Joseph Frank, from Spatial Form in Modern Literature
Part XIII: The New Novel, the Postmodern Novel
Alain Robbe-Grillet, from For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
Linda Hutcheon, "Historiographic Metafiction"
Part XIV: The Colonial and Postcolonial Novel
Doris Sommer and George Yudice, "Latin American Literature from the 'Boom' On"
Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?"
Kumkum Sangari, "The Politics of the Possible"
