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A 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist,
The True Story of the Novel disputes the British claim to the invention of the novel, calling it "one of the most successful literary lies." Margaret Anne Doody claims that the conventional separation of Romance and Novel was 18th-century England's approach to restricting the literary canon from anything "foreign" to their Empire. Not only did this distinction exclude the great novels of the Roman Empire--including Africa, Asia, and Europe--but it forced the novel, and therefore literature as well, into a narrowed definition of necessary "realism" that altered the way we interpret history. In redefining the Novel as a multicultural construct, Doody opens the relationship of literature and history to new connections.
In this revisionist account, the "true story" is different from the long-taught critical view that the novel is primarily a relatively modern, Western invention. According to Doody, a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt, orthodox definitions of the novel are too restrictive, leaving out thousands of years and many cultures. She begins by exploring several works of classical antiquity, then traces the novel from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. With the rise of realism in England in the 1700s, Doody contends, the novels of the past were dismissed as "romance," and this distinction has prevailed ever since. Doody then turns from a chronological to a thematic approach, discussing what she calls the tropes of the novel, the narrative symbols that all novels, from ancient to modern, share. Her analysis of tropes is remarkably wide-ranging, encompassing works by Richardson, Austen, Dickens, Mann, Mailer, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, and Morrison, to name just a few. Though there is some discussion of the literature of other cultures, most of the focus remains on the West. Recommended for active literature collections.
Mary Ellen Quinn
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