Theory of the Novel

by McKeon, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780801863974
• ISBN10: 080186397X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-11-01
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

Michael McKeon, author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, here assembles a collection of influential essays on the theory of the novel. Carefully chosen selections from Frye, Benjamin, Levi-Strauss, Lukacs, Bakhtin, and other prominent theorists explore the historical significance of the novel as a genre, from its early beginnings to its modern variations in the postmodern novel and postcolonial novel. Offering a generous selection of key theoretical texts for students and scholars alike, Theory of the Novel also presents a provocative argument for studying the genre. In his introduction to the volume and in headnotes to each section, McKeon argues that genre theory and history provide the best approach to understanding the novel. All the selections in this anthology date from the twentieth century--most from the last forty years--and represent the attempts of different theorists, and different theoretical schools, to describe the historical stages of the genre's formal development.

Author Biography

Michael McKeon is a professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, also available from Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	xiii
Part One Genre Theory	1	(70)
From Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays	5	(9)
Northrop Frye
From Validity in Interpretation	14	(20)
E. D. Hirsch
From Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History	34	(17)
Claudio Guillen
Toward a Theory of Non-Genre Literature	51	(6)
Jonathan Culler
From Origins of the Novel	57	(14)
Marthe Robert
Part Two The Novel as Displacement I: Structuralism	71	(74)
The Storyteller	77	(17)
Walter Benjamin
From The Savage Mind	94	(28)
Claude Levi-Strauss
From The Origin of Table Manners	100	(4)
How Myths Die	104	(9)
From The Naked Man	113	(9)
From Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays	122	(23)
Northrop Frye
From Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology	131	(8)
From The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance	139	(6)
Part Three The Novel as Displacement II: Psychoanalysis	145	(34)
From The Interpretation of Dreams	149	(11)
Sigmund Freud
Family Romances	156	(4)
From Origins of the Novel	160	(19)
Marthe Robert
Part Four Grand Theory I	179	(86)
From The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature	185	(80)
George Lukacs
From The Historical Novel	219	(46)
Part Five Grand Theory II	265	(52)
From Meditations on Quixote	271	(46)
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
Notes on the Novel	294	(23)
Part Six Grand Theory III	317	(38)
From The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays	321	(34)
Mikhail M. Bakhtin
Part Seven Revisionist Grand Theory	355	(80)
From The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding	363	(19)
Ian Watt
From Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel	382	(18)
Michael McKeon
From The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act	400	(14)
Fredric Jameson
From Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism	414	(21)
Benedict Anderson
Part Eight Privacy, Domesticity, Women	435	(50)
From The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding	441	(26)
Ian Watt
From Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel	467	(9)
Nancy Armstrong
From Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America	476	(9)
Gillian Brown
Part Nine Subjectivity, Character, Development	485	(102)
From Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction	493	(22)
Dorrit Cohn
From Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction	515	(22)
Ann Banfield
Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals	537	(17)
Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
From The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture	554	(12)
Franco Moretti
From The Historicity of Romantic Discourse	566	(21)
Clifford Siskin
Part Ten Realism	587	(70)
From Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject	593	(7)
Rosalind Coward
John Ellis
From Prose Fiction: Great Britain	600	(13)
Michael McKeon
From The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley	613	(19)
George Levine
From The Development of American Romance	632	(25)
Michael Davitt Bell
Part Eleven Photography, Film, and the Novel	657	(76)
From Preface to The Golden Bowl	665	(8)
Henry James
From The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction	673	(23)
Walter Benjamin
From Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange	696	(23)
Keith Cohen
In Defense of Mixed Cinema	719	(14)
Andre Bazin
Part Twelve Modernism	733	(70)
Modern Fiction	739	(20)
Virginia Woolf
Mr. Bennet and	745	(14)
Mrs. Brown
From Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle	759	(25)
George Lukacs
From Spatial Form in Modern Literature	784	(19)
Joseph Frank
Part Thirteen The New Novel, the Postmodern Novel	803	(48)
From For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction	809	(21)
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Historiographic Metafiction	830	(21)
Linda Hutcheon
Part Fourteen The Colonial and Postcolonial Novel	851	(72)
Latin American Literature from the ``Boom'' On	859	(23)
Doris Sommer
George Yudice
Is the Post-in Postmodernism the Post-in Postcolonial?	882	(18)
Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Politics of the Possible	900	(23)
Kumkum Sangari
Suggested Further Reading	923	(4)
Contributors	927	(4)
Source Acknowledgments	931	(6)
Index to Introduction and Headnotes	937	(4)
Index to Authors and Works	941