The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture; Volume II: Forms and Themes (review)

Weighing in at slightly under two thousand pages in this two-volume Englishlanguage edition (it filled five volumes in the original Italian), The Novel poses a challenge midway between Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Proust’s Recherche, to name only two of the famous novels that it addresses. Or, to take an analogy closer to home, this collection of just over one hundred pieces on topics from pre-literate oral narrative to the impact of computers on fiction equals roughly ten years of The Comparatist. Edited by Franco Moretti, the former director of Stanford University’s Center for the Study of the Novel, this book gives the impression of carrying out the research program outlined in Moretti’s 2000 manifesto, “Conjectures on World Literature.” Arguing that since no one scholar could do justice to the fiction produced worldwide in its temporal, geographical, and cultural scope, he proposed that the next best approach would have to involve “a patchwork of other people’s research” (57). Such scholarship would bring together the best work by specialists in the many relevant fields, and by attempting to synthesize their work would develop the more ambitious conclusions needed for a worldwide subject. As a means to this end, The Novel assembles a wide range of writings on the novel, packaging them in manageable forms that range from brief six-to-eight page “vignettes” concerning specific novels to forty-page chapters on major issues. Moretti himself provides only a two-page set of introductory remarks before launching the reader on a voyage of exploration and discovery that groups the chapters into ten units, with nine sections of vignettes attached to many of the units.¹

The result is multifaceted, and comparatists studying fiction from whatever time or place will value this book’s contributions to the theory of the novel, to a broad cross-cultural history of the genre, and to debate about the novel’s place in world literature. The Novel also teems with intriguing literary criticism, some of which stands out as models of differing comparative approaches. None of us, to be sure, is likely in our courses to cover a terrain as expansive as the one that Moretti lays out. But even a selective reading of this monumental project should alter our basic assumptions about the novels we teach, at the very least by alerting us to other kinds of long fiction and to different historical contexts from the ones that we have become accustomed to in our specialties. The Novel should also encourage us to range more widely and imaginatively as readers of fiction.

Among the theoretical issues addressed by The Novel, perhaps the most interesting ones focus on the genre’s gradual emergence, in a variety of settings throughout the world, out of a wide array of discourses ranging from legends and folktales to historical writings and epics. Thus an informative and thought-provoking section in Volume I examines “The Semantic Field of ‘Narrative’” in short essays on such broadly Western terms as “midrash,” “mythos,” and “romance,” as well as Japanese “monogatori,” Chinese “xiaoshuo,” Arab “qiṣṣa,” and Russian “povest’.” Another such section on “Prototypes” looks back over two millennia with vignettes of ten influential novels that founded subgenres, from Greek romance, Arab maqāmāt, and the picaresque novel to the feuilleton novel, science fiction, and magical realism. Longer chapters scattered through both volumes examine in fuller detail such allied topics as the rise of the Chinese novel (Andrew H. Plaks), the kinds of hostile criticism directed at the emergent novel in the West (Walter Siti), and the interaction between epic and novel as generic designations (Massimo Fusillo).

Especially striking in realigning thought about narrative in general is the chapter that opens Volume I. Anthropologist Jack Goody relies on field work among contemporary oral cultures in Africa to argue that “narrative, and in particular fictional narrative, is not a predominant...