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This is a bold and original original history of the novel from ancient Greece to the vibrant world of contemporary fiction. In this wide-ranging survey, Thomas Pavel argues that the driving force behind the novel's evolution has been a rivalry between stories that idealize human behavior and those that ridicule and condemn it. Impelled by this conflict, the novel moved from depicting strong souls to sensitive hearts and, finally, to enigmatic psyches. Pavel analyzes more than a hundred novels from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and beyond, resulting in a provocative reinterpretation of its development.
According to Pavel, the earliest novels were implausible because their characters were either perfect or villainous. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, novelists strove for greater credibility by describing the inner lives of ideal characters in minute detail (as in Samuel Richardson's case), or by closely examining the historical and social environment (as Walter Scott and Balzac did). Yet the earlier rivalry continued: Henry Fielding held the line against idealism, defending the comic tradition with its flawed characters, while Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot offered a rejoinder to social realism with their idealized vision of strong, generous, and sensitive women. In the twentieth century, modernists like Proust and Joyce sought to move beyond this conflict and capture the enigmatic workings of the psyche.
Pavel concludes his compelling account by showing how the old tensions persist even within today's pluralism, as popular novels about heroes coexist with a wealth of other kinds of works, from satire to social and psychological realism.
- Sales Rank: #1267246 in Books
- Published on: 2013-09-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.20" h x 1.20" w x 6.40" l, 1.40 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 360 pages
Review
Winner of the 2015 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize, The International Society for the Study of Narrative
Winner of the 2013 PROSE Award in Literature, Association of American Publishers
Shortlisted for the 2014 Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa Society
"Pavel has written the most interesting and subtle one-volume history of the novel currently available."--James Wood, New Yorker
"I learned more from the fruits of [the] erudition and study in The Lives of the Novel than I can express."--Paul Kottman, Los Angeles Review of Books
"[D]eft, incisive. . . . Thomas Pavel is a superb guide to the range and enduring power of the realist mode."--Thomas Keymer, Times Literary Supplement
"Pavel's study raises questions that can enrich readings of a wide range of fiction: What does it mean to live a virtuous life? How can humans achieve justice? What is an individual's responsibility to the community? To what extent is self-knowledge possible? These enduring questions infuse this erudite, elegantly written history with passion and urgency."--Kirkus Reviews
"The Lives of the Novel, first published in French as La Pensée du Roman, is a superb work that deserves to be very widely read by academics, students and anyone interested in the novel. . . . [A]stounding and stimulating. . . . [A] generous-hearted work. . . . Intelligent, insightful and astonishingly well-informed, The Lives of the Novel is a major intervention and I imagine that it will become the standard work in this field, and remain so for years to come. Best of all, it was a pleasure to review because Pavel's love of literature just beams out of each page: reading this book is like the joy of meeting a stranger in a crowd at a pop festival and enthusing together about bands you both love."--Robert Eaglestone, Times Higher Education
"Thomas G. Pavel unravels what a novel is in his thoroughly researched The Lives of the Novel: A History. This academic work is fascinating as it delves into the intricacies of the novel and its importance. . . . If you have ever wanted to know how the novel came to be what it is, Pavel is certainly an able guide."--Elizabeth Humphrey, San Francisco Book Review
"Pavel's stunning breadth of reading, combined with reasonable exposition, provides an ample window on one fascinating feature of the tangled bank origins and equally messy performance of the ever-evolving genre we call the novel."--William J. Scheick, English Literature in Transition
"[A]n immense journey of erudition that reads with the ease of fiction."--Nicolas Weill, Le Monde
From the Back Cover
"The Lives of the Novel is an extraordinary accomplishment, one that few would have dared to attempt and fewer still have had the talent to pull off. At once a work of intellectual and literary history, literary theory, and moral philosophy, all delivered in an unstintingly limpid, flowing, impassioned prose, it constitutes a worthy successor to the efforts of Auerbach, Bakhtin, Lukács, and Watt. It may, indeed, prove a formidable rival to all four."--Joshua Landy, Stanford University
"Brilliant, provocative, and clearly and forcefully argued, this is an instant classic of literary criticism. Addressing nothing less than the history of the novel from its beginnings in ancient Greece to the second half of the twentieth century, Pavel analyzes more than a hundred works, presenting exciting new ways of understanding them and their place in the genre's development."--David Quint, Yale University
About the Author
Thomas G. Pavel is Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French, Comparative Literature, and Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His books include Fictional Worlds and The Spell of Language.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A history of the novel that's more than a history of the novel.
By K. Bunker
I found this book to be a fascinating history of the novel. Describing it with the word "history" needs some qualification, however, because it isn't simply a catalog of notable books, laid out in the chronological order of their publication. As author Thomas Pavel says in his Introduction, "Rather than providing a complete inventory of authors and titles, this book aims to describe the major types of novel and the forces that have shaped their history."
This focus on "the major types of novel" is what makes this book uniquely interesting. There have been many such types, with different ones being dominant at different times in history: the chivalric romance, the picaresque, the satire, the gothic novel, and many more. Generally speaking, early novels were largely concerned with promoting ideals of human behavior, either by portraying characters of exemplary perfection, or with characters whose flaws and failings were lampooned. One of the general trends running through the history of the novel is a movement away from these ideal-promoting novels and towards those that observed characters and the world with greater realism and attention to the details of life. But Pavel doesn't try to impose any single theory or "illuminating concept" on the history of the novel. Rather he portrays that history as multi-threaded, with many different themes and approaches to story-telling rising and falling throughout history, perhaps becoming dominant at various times and places, but with many different types of novel often existing at the same point in time. To quote one representative passage from the book, in which he notes that the novel seemed to have arrived at a kind of "maturity" late in the 19th century:
"At the end of the nineteenth century, the novel appeared to have reached full maturity. In its various forms, it could portray complex human beings whose development and actions did not merely illustrate a preestablished set of norms and values. Writers knew how to connect these characters, their thoughts, and their deeds to a plausible social and historical environment. They reflected on the various ways in which love and couple formation succeeds or fails. And most of them used clear, comprehensible language, meant to reach a large group of educated readers. These achievements -- social realism, complex characters, nuanced reflections on love, and accessibility -- were in no danger of forcing writers into a uniform mold. Victor Hugo, Alessandro Manzoni, Dickens, and the popular novelists defended an idealized view of humanity, while Stendhal, Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope ironically exposed human imperfection. The moral optimism of George Eliot and Tolstoy, Flaubert's mixture of contempt and indulgence, the Goncourts' and Zola's dismal view of human nature, Dostoevsky's rejection of autonomy, Fontane's serenity, Thomas Hardy's earnestness, the enlightened despair of Eca de Queiros, Benito Perez Galdos, and Boleslaw Prus -- they were all flourishing within the same literary framework."
In presenting this complex history of the ebb and flow of novelistic themes, Pavel discusses a selection of influential books and authors at the various stages in that history. Many of these discussions are detailed and insightful, and stand as excellent examples of literary criticism in their own right. Throughout the book, Pavel's writing is clear, engaging, and refreshingly free of obscure academic jargon or esoteric theorizing.
This will be an engrossing and even essential book for anyone interested in the history of the novel. But it should also be read by those who never considered themselves interested in that history. The novel, of course, is not merely a form of entertainment. It is through the novel that human beings have applied some of their deepest thought into how people think and feel and behave, how the individual relates to society at large, into love and all the other high and low emotions, into what it means to be alive and human. The history of the novel, especially when approached as Thomas Pavel has in this book, is a history of human thought about humanity.
Full disclosure: I received a copy of this book in return for a review.
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