The True Story of the Novel

Rating:
Summary: Not really a surprise...
Review: Actually, this is new only to some sectors of the English-speaking canon, and its popularization in English-speaking countries. The rest of the world has clearly always known that: a)Greek ("Byzantine") novels, as well as the works of Lucian and Apuleius hold the seeds of the modern novel; b) the Italian novella established some of its canonic structural characteristics, and c) Cervantes and the Spanish picaresque did the same thing as Richardson, Defoe, Sterne, and Fielding, only 100 years before them.

Rating:
Summary: Professor Doody has departed
Review: Margaret Doody comes with a revisionist's tools to the volumes in which theories of the novel are written-- scissors, to remove objectionable pages; paper-- to replace the censored pages; pen-- to write a new theory upon the pages; and bold prose-- to combat figures literary, philosophical, and cultural whose disagreeable views must be revised. I am only a maverick of literary criticism; but I enjoyed the book, and recommend it to any interested in the development of the genre known as the novel.

Rating:
Summary: changed my reading life
Review: This book was an education for me. I had been taught that the novel started with Richardson or if you must Defoe. Doody argues for a much earlier genesis, in the Greek romance. Whether you buy this argument or not depends on whether you define romance as part of the novel. But in the process I learned about the ancient Greek and Roman romances, and I went off and found the books she cited (Collected Ancient Greek Novels and separately the Roman romances), and read most of the romances. It doesn't take long, since they're short and there aren't that many. In particular I loved Petronius, Chariton, and Apuleius. Doody goes on to trace the transmission of the romance through the Renaissance, Boccaccio being the hero here. Printing played a key role in dissemination at this stage. Later on my own I was surprised to find images in Shakespeare that must have come right out of some of these ancient romances. And so on into our own time. Perhaps everybody knows this history, but I didn't. The title is a play on words having to do with the title of one of the old romances.