The True Story of the Novel - Softcover

Twentieth-century historians and critics defending the novel have emphasized its role as superseding something else, as a sort of legitimate usurper that deposed the Epic, a replacement of myth, or religious narrative. To say that the Age of Early Christianity was really also the Age of the Novel rumples such historical tidiness--but so it was. From the outset of her discussion, Doody rejects the conventional Anglo-Saxon distinction between Romance and Novel. This eighteenth-century distinction, she maintains, served both to keep the foreign--dark-skinned peoples, strange speakers, Muslims, and others--largely out of literature, and to obscure the diverse nature of the novel itself.

This deeply informed and truly comparative work is staggering in its breadth. Doody treats not only recognized classics, but also works of usually unacknowledged subgenres--new readings of novels like The Pickwick Papers, Puddn'head Wilson, L'Assommoir, Death in Venice, and Beloved  are accompanied by insights into Death on the Nile or The Wind in the Willows. Non-Western writers like Chinua Achebe and Witi Ihimaera are also included. In her last section, Doody goes on to show that Chinese and Japanese novels, early and late, bear a strong and not incidental affinity to their Western counterparts. Collectively, these readings offer the basis for a serious reassessment of the history and the nature of the novel.

The True Story of the Novel marks the beginning of the twenty-first century's understanding of fiction and of culture. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in literature.

A 1996 Choice Outstanding Academic Book. A 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. "One of the most successful literary lies," declares Margaret Anne Doody, "is the English claim to have invented the novel. . . . One of the best-kept literary secrets is the existence of novels in antiquity." In fact, as Doody goes on to demonstrate, the novel of the Roman Empire is the product of African, Western Asian, and European influences. It is with this argument that The True Story of the Novel overturns and alters widely held views of the history of the novel. "An erudite, intelligent and imaginative work of literary scholarship. With vivacity, grace, and wit, Doody traces the history from the ancient novels of Apuleius and Heliodorus through the Renaissance fictions of Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Rabelais to the 'official' birth of the novel in 18th-century England. . . . More than a work of brilliant and inventive scholarship, this is an invitation to the great adventure of novel reading."--Boston Globe "Written with verve and wit . . . by any standard an extraordinary and idiosyncratic achievement."--Frank Kermode, The London Review of Books "Big, passionate . . . a bold and contrary statement."--Chronicle of Higher Education "Offers a corrective to those who find the origins of the novel in the 16th or 17th century. . . . Her treatment is thorough and sophisticated but accessible to the general reader. It is also ambitious and one of the few works that can truly claim to look at world literature."--Library Journal