The True Story of the Novel [Anglais] [Broché]

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.

Doody, a novelist and the director of Vanderbilt University's comparative literature program, offers a corrective to those who find the origins of the novel in the 16th or 17th century. Challenging the distinction between novel and romance, Doody examines in depth ancient Greek and Roman prose narrative, tracing the novel's transformations through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and 18th century. She shows the continuity between the ancient novel and the modern, as well as the striking affinities between the Western novel and those of Africa, China, and Japan. Her treatment is thorough and sophisticated yet accessible to the general reader. It is also ambitious and one of the few works that can truly claim to look at world literature.?Thomas L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

In this vibrant book, Ms. Doody makes a case for the restoration of breadth to the teaching of literary history. She should be heeded. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

In this revisionist account, the "true story" is different from the long-taught critical view that the novel is primarily a relatively modern, Western invention. According to Doody, a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt, orthodox definitions of the novel are too restrictive, leaving out thousands of years and many cultures. She begins by exploring several works of classical antiquity, then traces the novel from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. With the rise of realism in England in the 1700s, Doody contends, the novels of the past were dismissed as "romance," and this distinction has prevailed ever since. Doody then turns from a chronological to a thematic approach, discussing what she calls the tropes of the novel, the narrative symbols that all novels, from ancient to modern, share. Her analysis of tropes is remarkably wide-ranging, encompassing works by Richardson, Austen, Dickens, Mann, Mailer, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, and Morrison, to name just a few. Though there is some discussion of the literature of other cultures, most of the focus remains on the West. Recommended for active literature collections. Mary Ellen Quinn --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

A massively erudite, groundbreaking revision of the novel's historical development. Traditionally, Anglo-American criticism located the rise of the novel in 18th-century England and the troika of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. The realism that characterized their books--Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, etc.--was declared to be the hallmark of a new and wonderful genre: the novel. The thousands of prose fictions that had come before were dismissed as mere romances or that bland entity, ``extended prose works.'' Doody's (Comparative Literature/Vanderbilt Univ.; Frances Burney, 1988, etc.) goal is nothing less than to restore these slighted works, particularly those from the classical world, to the novel's fold, to their proper and primary place in the Western canon. Starting in 100 b.c. with the oldest surviving novel, the Greek Chaireas and Kallirroe by Chariton, Doody convincingly demonstrates the underlying realism of these neglected novels as, point by point, from questions of character and voice to literary self- consciousness, she demolishes the previous quibbling barriers. She also demonstrates how the classical novels, particularly Apuleius's The Golden Ass, continued to influence more modern novels (her ability to cross-reference is truly breathtaking). Taking a few too many pages from Jung, Doody then goes on to elaborate the deep mythic structures--from dreams to death to goddess worship--that all novels share; apart from further proving her continuity thesis, most of this feels overlong and out of place. We will probably never know what really was the first novel, but Doody, building on the work of others, argues cogently for the form's religious beginnings--a ritual diary of an initiate's path to spiritual gnosis. In her view, the modern novel is not that different: ``We make a not unimportant spiritual and political as well as personal move when we open a novel and become initiates, entering upon the marshy margins of becoming.'' Despite some minor imperfections, a major, even seminal work. (8 color, 39 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"An erudite, intelligent and imaginative work of literary scholarship. With vivacity, grace, and wit, Doody traces the history ›of the novel| from the ancient novels of Apuleium and Heliodorus through the Renaissance fictions of Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Rabelais to the 'official' birth of the novel in 18th-century England".--BOSTON GLOBE. 39 illustrations .