New Left Review 52, July-August 2008

FRANCO MORETTI

THE NOVEL: HISTORY AND THEORY

There are many ways of talking about the theory of the novel, and mine will consist in posing three questions: Why are novels in prose; Why are they so often stories of adventures; and, Why was there a European, but not a Chinese rise of the novel in the course of the eighteenth century. Disparate as they may sound, the questions have a common source in the guiding idea of the collection The Novel: ‘to make the literary field longer, larger, and deeper’: historically longer, geographically larger, and morphologically deeper than those few classics of nineteenth-century Western European ‘realism’ that have dominated the recent theory of the novel (and my own work). [1] What the questions have in common, then, is that they all point to processes that loom large in the history of the novel, but not in its theory. Here, I will reflect on this discrepancy, and suggest a few possible alternatives.