Limits of the Novel

What are the limits of the novel? What is the relationship between a work of fiction and reality? How does the writer engage the reader's commitment, and how do successive generations of readers affect the work of art? These are some of the questions that Professor Grossvogel seeks to answer in his wide-ranging new study of the novel.

After a chapter on the relation between the novel and its reader, he explores in detail the significant efforts of increasingly sophisticated authors to respond to increasingly sophisticated readers from the Middle Ages to the present. Variously experimental works such as Troilus and Criseyde, Don Quixote, La Princesse de Clevès, Tristram Shandy, The Trial, Remembrance of Things Past, and Nausea give lively evidence for his thesis. There is also a comparative study of Joyce and Robbe-Grillet, as well as the concluding chapter "The Novel as Ritual," based on Robinson Crusoe and The Idiot.

In developing a new methodology for analyzing fiction, Professor Grossvogel clarifies and characterizes the most recent experiments in novelistic technique, and places them in perspective by comparing them to earlier ones. His conclusions about the nature of the novel, about the continuing interaction between author and reader, and about the evolutions of the novel as a form are an original contribution to modern critical theory.

One of the first works in English to make extensive use of the methods of postwar European philosophical criticism, the book will stimulate controversy and make fascinating reading for anyone concerned with the history—and future—of the novel.