The True Story of the Novel - Softcover

Margaret Anne Doody

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813524539 ISBN 13: 9780813524535

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

 

About this title

Review:

A 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, The True Story of the Novel disputes the British claim to the invention of the novel, calling it "one of the most successful literary lies." Margaret Anne Doody claims that the conventional separation of Romance and Novel was 18th-century England's approach to restricting the literary canon from anything "foreign" to their Empire. Not only did this distinction exclude the great novels of the Roman Empire--including Africa, Asia, and Europe--but it forced the novel, and therefore literature as well, into a narrowed definition of necessary "realism" that altered the way we interpret history. In redefining the Novel as a multicultural construct, Doody opens the relationship of literature and history to new connections.

About the Author:

Margaret Anne Doody has edited and introduced many texts for OWC and Penguin, including novels by Frances Burney and Charlotte Lennox. She is the editor of Austen's Catharine and Other Writings in OWC. She is the author of The True Story of the Novel (HarperCollines/Fontana 1998) and novels
featuring the detective Aristotle. Claire Lamont has edited novels by Walter Scott and Austen for OWC and Penguin. She is the textual editor of Penguin's edition of Jane Austen's novels.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0813524539
• ISBN 13: 9780813524535
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 610