The Novel Quotes

“When I first opened this book and saw all those scholarly footnotes, my heart leapt up as though I saw a host of golden daffodils.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“I'faith, 'tis an Occasion of no small Satisfaction to commence this Enquiry into the Romances & Fiction of the English--& their antick Neighbors, the Irish & the Scotch--free at last from the Tyranny of scurvy Translators--& to reacquaint myself with the earliest Works that engender'd my Love for the Novel. O Swift, O Fielding, O Sterne, I hail thee after too long an Absence, keen to revel once more in your rare Inventions and pricking Raillery, along with those of your less-fam'd Countrymen. Prithee look kindly on these Efforts of yr humble Servant to blazon your Glories to the gaping Pucklick.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Sorel's novels deserve to be revived, but Polexander can be left in its watery grave.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Novelists always set up obstacles for lovers to overcome to make their eventual union all the more sastisfying, but Gomberville portrays love as a long, tedious ocean voyage to someplace miserable.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Polexander is a candidate, Thomas DiPiero proposes, for "what may be the most tortuous and labyrinthine narrative in all of French literature".”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“I had to keep checking the copyright page to remind myself this novel [Karl Moritz's Anton Reiser] was published in 1785, not 1985.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Marcus de Obregón is appealing and, yes, instructive, but is not entirely successful because the author often forgot he was writing a novel, not his memoirs.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“For some of us, there are few terms that induce narcosis quicker than "Christian allegory.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“While it would be too reductive (but not wrong) to say Cervantes equates knight-errantry with religious belief, he does seem to insinuate a syllogism that goes: Chivalric novels are false; the Bible resembles those novels; therefore, the Bible is false. But Cervantes gleefully complicates matters by insisting repeatedly that Don Quixote is true, which he and everyone who reads it knows is untrue.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“4. You've had enough of the big city and decide to return home. Waiting for a bus, you pick up a discarded copy of Larva and, because you have a long bus-ride ahead of you, begin reading. You quickly discover it is not a conventional novel. Do you:
(a) discard it and stare out the window all the way back home?
(b)”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Reader, I'd marry her.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800