ABSTRACT

A century after Georg Lukács launched literary theory as we know it with the publication of The Theory of the Novel, that work remains a vital resource for novel theory. Lukács’s famed thesis that the novel is “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” establishes the intimate relation of the novel and nihilism. What is at stake in this relation is intensified by Nietzsche’s suggestion that reality does not take the form of a worldexcept under the watchful eye of a monotheistic God and by the multiple and contradictory meanings of nihilism itself in modern thought. These issues are explored by examining Lukács’s twofold conception of the novel’s “problematic individual” and “contingent reality” and transposing those terms into the question of the “essence of singularity” (Philip Roth) manifest in the creation of novelistic protagonists and the “ordeal of universalism” into which novelists themselves plunge by venturing their creation in the public sphere.

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