In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Research in African Literatures 31.2 (2000) 236-237



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Cultural Institutions of the Novel


Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deirdre Lynch and William B. Warner. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 489 pp. ISBN 0-8223-1843-1 paper.

This is an important collection challenging the conventional genealogies of the novel. Deirdre Lynch, William Warner, and the contributors contest the rise-of-the-novel thesis that has held sway since Ian Watt published his seminal book The Rise of the Novel in 1957. As the editors rightly point out, the novel has played a hegemonic role in the formation of the literary canon. Believed by many critics to be a uniquely Western form that catalyzed print culture to serve the interests of the rising European bourgeoisie, the novel has always been regarded as alien to non-Western societies and therefore as much an agent of European colonialism as law, education, and other cultural institutions. It is in the latter sense that the title of this volume has a peculiarly fitting resonance as it marks the advances of the novel made in colonial societies, which in turn colonized the novel by adapting it to indigenous forms. The strength of the volume lies in its obstinate refusal to be sidetracked into an identification of the generic features of novel-writing in the narratives they encounter. Rather, the editors and contributors aim to show the cultural work performed by novels in various national contexts and histories. If what they find does not accord with the dominant accounts of the development of bourgeois sensibility, they show this is so because the novel has complex histories of reception, adaptation, and revision in the other societies where it has grown.

The novel's assured place in the modern university curriculum establishes its centrality in literary studies as the principal agent of bourgeois subjectivity. As Homer Brown's prologue suggests, the novel's appearance in [End Page 236] the curriculum at the same time as modernism's debut in the guise of New Criticism gave two related but distinct meanings to the word institution: on the one hand, as foundation and structure, and on the other, as a process of becoming. While the first meaning is more familiar, signaling a culture's acceptance, recognition, and legitimation of a defined set of practices, the latter meaning is equally important, since it asserts the propensity of cultural practices to shape, influence, and indeed even coerce behavior, conduct, and thought. Brown cites Lewis Leary's trenchant comment that "power over another's mind [. . .] can be enormously dangerous. But that is education, and that is literature too" (29) as a fitting illustration of the novel's ability to produce predetermined behaviors by joining its functions to those of education.

Cultural Institutions of the Novel appears at a moment in contemporary English studies when studies of the novel have reached a point of crisis. The sense of crisis is not an altogether unhealthy one, as it derives from a historicist refusal to accept literary form apart from its ideological derivation. The location of the novel in society, as well as a study of its power relations, has enabled a shift away from genre study--a study of what the novel is--to a study of what novels do. The focus of Cultural Institutions of the Novel on process rather than origins radically alters the questions normally asked about the novel, such as its evolution from the rise of the bourgeoisie. Instead, the contributors analyze the productive power of novels in culture, including their negotiation of transnational identities and their role as a site of transnational exchange. This allows the editors to conclude that "the global disseminations of novel reading and novel writing has made the novel a discursive site where the relations among nations are brokered" (3).

By evoking a number of different cultural and institutional histories, the collection illuminates processes of canon formation and the privileging of some genres over others. The spread of "national" literatures covered is impressive. It includes the Western reception of non-Western novels (as trenchantly analyzed by...

pdf

Share