Eurasian Fiction

Histories of the novel range from the narrow to the unbounded. English-language critics have usefully equated the origin of the form with the first English specimens, such as Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) or Richardson's Pamela (1740). At the other extreme, the novel can be effectively defined as any extended work of prose fiction. The present essay falls in between, arguing for a central category of Eurasian fiction that extends back 2500 years. Having evoked social developments to suggest the novel's conditions of possibility, it then deploys the comparison of fiction East and West to account for those developments—in particular, Europe's path to modernity. It thus reverses a standard analytical procedure by proposing an expanded role for cultural explanation of large-scale change.