num_pages: 704
description: This title tells a comprehensive history - and controversial reappraisal - of the world's most popular and innovative literary form. Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom the novel did not originate in 18th-century England nor even with Don Quixote but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction in which Moore defends innovative demanding novelists against their conservative critics the book relaxes into a world tour of the premodern novel beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction tracing a continuum between these premodern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent iconoclastic informative entertaining - The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.
language: English
title: The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
publisher: Continuum