Abstract
“The word Novel in all languages signifies something new,” writes Clara Reeve in 1785. But what exactly is the relationship between the novel and novelty? More than a simple designator of the new-ness of a genre, the new is bound up with the novel’s ontology and function as an art form. On its most fundamental level, this essay argues, the novel’s novelty is not a qualitative matter but rather a matter of the novel’s foundational aesthetic problem insofar as the novel’s very essence lies in its commitment to constant formal change in order to represent and make thinkable the new itself as a changing historical category. Attention to the changing status of the category of the new in the novel, this essay shows, may not only allow us to draw conclusions about the novel’s status today but also about the novel’s recent historical development, therefore affording us one way of understanding literary history after the end of the postmodern, in a time, that is, when both the novel and criticism struggle to determine what happens to novelty after the end of the “post-.”
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Notes
- 1.
I use the term “genre” here to reflect the terminology of early criticism on the novel that seeks to articulate the rise of the novel in relation to the tradition of other literary genres. That is, critics speak of the rise of the novel as a new genre that adds to or at times even replaces aspects of the traditional literary genres (epic, drama, poetry, and so on). In the context of contemporary criticism, however, it is more common to address these matters by speaking of novelistic form.
- 2.
Of course, this is also true for Rennix’s foreshortened account of science fiction, which is well-known to be more than a matter of imagining simple futures, since the genre has an important, enabling relationship to the present. One may point here to Ursula K. LeGuin’s famous suggestion in Left Hand of Darkness (1969) that good science fiction is never predictive but rather descriptive or to Samuel R. Delany’s suggestion in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977) that science fiction that does not reflect on the present and that becomes a version of bad adventure fiction is, as he puts it, “our true anti-literature.”
- 3.
For representative examples of these debates, see the special issue of PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010) dedicated to the topic “Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century” and New Literary History 37 and 38 (2007) dedicated to the topic “What Is Literature Now?”
- 4.
For the most prominent examples, see Jameson’s Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; or Harvey, David. 1992. The Condition of Postmodernity. London and New York: Wiley.
- 5.
The, in my mind, most rigorously executed account of this development, in particular with regard to the consequences of the return to realism for our understanding of both recent literary history and the history of postmodernism is Madhu Dubey’s 2011 essay Post-Postmodern Realism? Twentieth-Century Literature 57 (3–4) (Fall/Winter): 364–371.
- 6.
Bakhtin leans heavily on Schlegel’s various “fragments” that discuss the novel in general and the novel’s relation to the epic in particular, which were published in Athenaeum, the literary magazine that Schlegel and August Wilhelm co-founded in 1798. The magazine went defunct shortly after 1800, and its fragments are today available in library collections or via digitizing services, including Google Books: https://books.google.ca/books?id=sCA9AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
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Nilges, M. (2020). The Novel’s Novelty Now. In: Lanzendörfer, T., Norrick-Rühl, C. (eds) The Novel as Network. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_3
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