How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

Before exploring the novel’s unique narrative elements, Foster surveys the genre’s history, showing how it evolved in sync with cultural and economic developments. As a form, the novel grew out of many prose traditions, from epics such as The Iliad (by Homer) and The Epic of Gilgamesh (anonymous) to travelogues, autobiographies, and romances. The first recognizable European novel is said to be Joanot Martorell’s 1490 French tract Tirant lo Blanch, published on the eve of Christopher Columbus’s exploration of the world. Foster posits that the date is not a coincidence; instead, it suggests that the novel links to the rise of capitalism and modernity.

The next big development in the novel arose in the 17th and 18th centuries with the emergence of two novels considered the “first” of Modern tradition. One, attributed to Madame de Lafayette, has fallen out of favor but was as huge a hit in its time as today’s Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. The novel was the French La Princesse de Cleves (1678), considered the first novel of analysis because it investigated its characters’ emotions and mental states. The second, far more enduring contribution, and considered a masterpiece of world literature, was Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605). Published in Spanish and translated into several languages, Don Quixote featured the iconic pairing of an out-of-touch but noble hero, Quixote, and his sidekick, Sancho Panza. In addition, because Cervantes wrote it as a parody of outrageous heroic narratives of the past, Don Quixote revealed the novel’s subversive capacity.

An interesting feature of the novel genre is that the word novel itself is not always precise. For instance, many of the famous novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are considered romances because they focus more on archetypal and supernatural elements than on characters’ interior lives. However, for coherence, most book-length fictional prose narratives are now classified as novels. The early novel peaked in its Victorian form, as is evident in the works of George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. The Victorian novel’s form is still emulated because it has elements that work: a linear narrative, plots centering on characters who must grow up and conquer difficulties, and an emotionally satisfying resolution.

Written as serial installments for monthly journals over as long as two years, these novels needed to include elements like memorable characters and cliffhangers to sustain readers’ interest. While they are now considered as classics, the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot were commercial ventures adapted to the tastes of the reading public. This shows that art and commerce are not as separate as purists would believe: Unlike the lyrical poem, the novel has always been meant to bring its authors an income. Since the Victorian formula worked so well, one might think that the novel did not need to deviate from the format after the late 19th century. Nevertheless, the novel changed—dramatically.

The change in the novel reflected the monumental and swift shift from the Victorian age to the early Modern period. Within a few decades, technology enabled people riding in buggies to consider buying cars. New strides in psychology and philosophy explored the psyche (via Sigmund Freud) and the existence of God (via Friedrick Nietzsche). Modernist fiction tried to capture this changed reality with experiments in form and language. Writers like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka “made complete hash of whatever the conventions may have been” (12). Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a stream-of-consciousness novel that details a single day in the life of its protagonist, and the plot consists mostly of her thoughts. The vocabulary of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1924) draws heavily on made-up words and arbitrary phrases like “regginbrow, and “bellowsed mishe mishe” (15). Joyce’s works were considered highly experimental and played with language, while those of formalists like E. M. Forster explored the idea of consciousness.

Although the Modernist novel and its successor, Postmodernist fiction, continued to play with form, language, and narrative, the Victorian novel never disappeared. Linear narratives may be considered outdated in so-called literary fiction, but they endure in genre works such as romance and thriller novels. The simultaneous existence of highly experimental and traditional novels shows that every age has innovators and formalists. Sometimes, formalists rebel against the imperative to rebel itself. Thus, every literary history, including Foster’s, is a partial lie, since it gives the impression that a time period has uniform literary tastes. Reporting forms and developments can never capture the giddy diversity of voices in fiction.