The True Story of the Novel

by Margaret Anne Doody

Twentieth-century historians and critics defending the novel have emphasized its role as superceding something else, as a sort of legitimate usurper that deposed the Epic, a replacement of myth, or religious narrative. To say that the Age of Early Christianity was really also the Age of the Novel rumples such historical tidiness––but so it was. From the outset of her discussion, Doody rejects the conventional Anglo-Saxon distinction between Romance and Novel. This eighteenth-century distinction, she maintains, served both to keep the foreign––dark-skinned peoples, strange speakers, Muslims, and others––largely out of literature, and to obscure the diverse nature of the novel itself.

This deeply informed and truly comparative work is staggering in its breadth. Doody treats not only recognized classics, but also works of usually unacknowledged subgenres––new readings of novels like The Pickwick Papers, Puddn’head Wilson, L’Assommoir, Death in Venice, and Beloved  are accompanied by insights into Death on the Nile or The Wind in the Willows. Non-Western writers like Chinua Achebe and Witi Ihimaera are also included. In her last section, Doody goes on to show that Chinese and Japanese novels, early and late, bear a strong and not incidental affinity to their Western counterparts. Collectively, these readings offer the basis for a serious reassessment of the history and the nature of the novel.

The True Story of the Novel marks the beginning of the twenty-first century’s understanding of fiction and of culture. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in literature.

 

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, 20th Century, Criticism

610 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1996

About the author

Aka Margaret Doody

Margaret Anne Doody is a Canadian author of historical detective fiction and a feminist literary critic. She is professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame, helped found the PhD in Literature Program at Notre Dame, and served as its director from 2001-2007.

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rich and wide-ranging study of the novel as a form, as a kind of storehouse/playhouse of deep mythic structures that crosses all national, linguistic, and temporal boundaries. Doody utterly rejects all attempted origin stories for the novel, seeing it instead as rooted in a fundamental human need for narrative as a way to navigate and revel in the complex messiness of human life. She provides a detailed reading of the major works of prose fiction that survive from the classical period, then traces their survival and transformation and influence in later periods, paying particular attention to novelistic tropes that shape and connect narratives at a deep level. She began as a scholar of eighteenth-century English fiction, so novels from that period are important here, but she also ranges across the fiction of several European traditions (Spanish, French, German) and touches on the fiction of the Middle East and Asia. She is formidably learned and multilingual. This is the kind of critical study that is the result of decades of learning and experience.

[Sasha]

This! This is the book I've been trying to think of. Thank you Michael Schmidt for reminding me; he thinks it's great. I should totally read this, like, next year or whatever.

[Andrea Omicini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Per gli amanti dell'Aristotele detective, una versione di Margaret Moody decisamente diversa: scopriamo finalmente chi è Doody "al lavoro" di professore universitario. Ed è una bella scoperta: il libro è decisamente originale, esaustivo, chiaro, bello, interessante, piacevole. Magari un po' virato alle "gender issue", ma sicuramente c'è un bel po' di "gap" da riempire, nel settore.
Per chi come me ama i libri belli da leggere che danno "nuovi pensieri" su cose già pensate, e che non finiscono in fretta, sicuramente una lettura assolutamente da consigliare.

[Maher Battuti · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is excellent in the research point of view. It is a scholarly work that seems to answer the famous book of Ian Watt "The Rise of the Novel", and other books that put the birth of the novel in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The Author highlights the Latin novels and stories and indicate their influence on the rise of the novel. But she misses a very important book of stories: The One Thousand and One Nights". This book is in its entirety forms a novel, tied by the frame of the king and the princess who tells stories.It is a fact that this book, and others like Calila and Dimna, the religious stories of the night travel of the Prophet, and many others have been known in the west through Spain, Sicily and the Crusades.
I was moved by this book to write my book called " The Mother Novel: Alf Lila Wa Lila and the World Literature", which was published in 2005. I explained at length the imprints of the stories of "The Arabian Nights" and their impact on the stories, poetry and novels of all literature in many countries, and the many ways those stories have been transmitted beyond borders.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides]

Seems interesting. Also, has nice illustrations.