The novel is the most important form of Western art. It aims to represent the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature sends out against the systematic thought of science and philosophy. Indebted to Lukacs and Bakhtin, to Auerbach and Ian Watt, Guido Mazzoni's Theory of the Novel breaks new ground, building a historical understanding of how the novel became the modern book of life: one of the best representations of our experience of the world.
The genre arose during a long metamorphosis of narrative forms that took place between 1550 and 1800. By the nineteenth century it had come to encompass a corpus of texts distinguished by their freedom from traditional formal boundaries and by the particularity of their narratives. Mazzoni explains that modern novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever, by narrators who exist like us as contingent beings within time and space. They therefore present an interpretation, not a copy, of the world.
Novels grant new importance to the stories of ordinary men and women and allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth. As Theory of the Novel makes clear, this art form narrates an epoch and a society in which individual experiences do not converge but proliferate, in which the common world has fragmented into a plurality of small, local worlds, each absolute in its particularity."
Author(s): Guido Mazzoni, Zakiya Hanafi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Year: 2017
Language: English
Commentary: EBSCOhost
Pages: 378
Tags: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Novel Criticism
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Translator’s Note
Introduction: Truth and Literature
Why the Novel Matters
Books of Life
Games of Truth
Literature and Reality
What Is the Novel?
Chapter One: A Theory of Narrative
People and Leaves
Mimesis and Concept
The Hidden Contents of Mimesis
The Confines of Mimesis
Between Nothingness and Ideas: The Mimetic Discontinuity
Stories
Narrative and Existential Analytics
Narrators
Levels of Reality
Being in the World
Chapter Two: The Origin of the Novel
Historical Semantics
The Question of Origins
The First Corpus
Symbolic Thresholds: 1550
Symbolic Thresholds: 1670
The Territory of the Romance
The Territory of the Novel
The Rise of the Novel
Chapter Three: The Novel and the Literature of the Ancien Régime
The Dialectic of Continuity and Change
A Cohesive Epoch
Classicism and the Separation of Styles
Aesthetic Platonism
Moralism and Allegory
Moralistic Apparatuses, Poetic Justice, Exemplary Heroes
The Legitimization of the Romance
The Legitimization of the Novel
Chapter Four: The Book of Particular Life
The Romance and Private Aims
Suspense, Entrelacement, and the Romanesque
The History of Private Lives
A Discursive Gap
The Pathos of Proximity
The Interesting
The Novel’s Readership
Particular Life
National Differences: France and England
Chapter Five: The Birth of the Modern Novel
Freedom from the Rules of Style
Freedom from Allegory and Morality
Moralism, Empathy, and Observation
A New Conceptual Ether
The Weight of Novels
The Expansion of the Narratable World
The Middle Station of Life
The Serious Mimesis of Everyday Life
The World of Prose
Center and Periphery
Narrative Democracy
Chapter Six: The Nineteenth-Century Paradigm
Abstractions
Realisms
The Frameworks of the Nineteenth-Century Paradigm
The Figurative Novel and Its Theatrical Model
The Discovery of the Environment
Dependent Individuals
The Melodramatic Model
The Significance of the Melodramatic Novel
The Romance in the Novel, Special Characters
The Novel of Personal Destinies
A Map of the Nineteenth-Century Paradigm
Chapter Seven: The Transition to Modernism
The Second Phase of Nineteenth-Century Realism
Realism without Melodrama
Historical Stations
New Narrators
New Plots
New Characters
Three Turning Points
Short Stories and Epiphanies
Worlds Apart
The Modern Forms of the Romance
The Sense of a Transformation
Chapter Eight: On Contemporary Fiction
After Modernism
The Decline of the New
A Multiple Archipelago
Conclusion: A Theory of the Novel
The Genre of Particularity
Relativism and Perspectivism
An Analytics of Existence
Discursive Transformations
The Design of This Book
On the Present State of Things
Acknowledgments
Index
