The Cambridge companion to the novel /
Eric Bulson, "The novel is sogged with humanity." E.M. Forster, "His studies are not very deep," one character says about another in George Eliot's Middlemarch, "he is only reading a novel." Just imagine if that same critical judgement about novels and novel reader...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
[2018]
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| Summary: | Eric Bulson, "The novel is sogged with humanity." E.M. Forster, "His studies are not very deep," one character says about another in George Eliot's Middlemarch, "he is only reading a novel." Just imagine if that same critical judgement about novels and novel readers were accurate today! Not only would it be assumed that we all read novels merely to pass the time, but also with the assumption that they don't have much to teach us in the first place. We'd only be reading a novel, and that's it. The real knowledge about life and living, we'd be told, lies elsewhere, maybe in the great epics of bygone ages, intensely private lyric poems or sweeping dramas where all the world's a stage. The novel, of course, still has its detractors, but no one can deny that this literary genre runs "very deep." Part of that depth comes from the fact that the novel, a term ironically rooted in the Latin word for new (novum), is actually rather old. In fact, by some accounts it goes back 4,000 years to the narrative fictions of ancient Egypt with examples appearing subsequently as far afield as Hellenistic Greece, the histories and romances of medieval China and France, and the subgenres of modern England, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, Japan and the United States. And if the forms of the novel are indeed many, they are evidence enough that there has been an ongoing desire across cultures and over millenia to tell fictional stories in prose about life. |
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| Physical Description: | xviii, 314 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781107156210 1107156211 9781316609774 1316609774 |