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Theory of the Novel
The novel is the most important form of Western art. It aims to represent the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature sends out against the systematic thought of science and philosophy. Indebted to Lukacs and Bakhtin, to Auerbach and Ian Watt, Guido Mazzoni s Theory of the Novel breaks new ground, building a historical understanding of how the novel became the modern book of life: one of the best representations of our experience of the world.
The genre arose during a long metamorphosis of narrative forms that took place between 1550 and 1800. By the nineteenth century it had come to encompass a corpus of texts distinguished by their freedom from traditional formal boundaries and by the particularity of their narratives. Mazzoni explains that modern novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever, by narrators who exist like us as contingent beings within time and space. They therefore present an interpretation, not a copy, of the world.
Novels grant new importance to the stories of ordinary men and women and allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth. As Theory of the Novel makes clear, this art form narrates an epoch and a society in which individual experiences do not converge but proliferate, in which the common world has fragmented into a plurality of small, local worlds, each absolute in its particularity.
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The genre arose during a long metamorphosis of narrative forms that took place between 1550 and 1800. By the nineteenth century it had come to encompass a corpus of texts distinguished by their freedom from traditional formal boundaries and by the particularity of their narratives. Mazzoni explains that modern novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever, by narrators who exist like us as contingent beings within time and space. They therefore present an interpretation, not a copy, of the world.
Novels grant new importance to the stories of ordinary men and women and allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth. As Theory of the Novel makes clear, this art form narrates an epoch and a society in which individual experiences do not converge but proliferate, in which the common world has fragmented into a plurality of small, local worlds, each absolute in its particularity.
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408 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 1, 2022
Guido Mazzoni spent 15 years (1995 - 2010) in writing this comprehensive survey of the rise of the novel and the distinctive features of the genre. Extremely helpful to students and lovers of the novel. What Mazzoni doesn't emphasize in the conclusion of his book is his indebtedness to Wittgenstein's hypothesis on family resemblances. For me this is the main breakthrough in the methodology of the book. Remarkable translation into English.
June 2, 2019
Strutture del senso.
May 15, 2022
very repetitive, but overall interesting
August 25, 2023
Brilliant, stimulating, endless insight. Like his book on modern poetry, Mazzoni expertly embeds the novel genre within the larger framework of Western poetics. Genre is the key here, for both books, which represents one mode of the universal; and, in Mazzoni's hands, the due attention to genre assists to counteract modernity's heavy emphasis on the particular. Even as Mazzoni elaborates the longue durée of the novel, with his focus on poetics and genre, I think he also excels at demonstrating the modernity of the novel--the individual point of view and the unrestricted scope of (everyday) objects deemed worthy of narrative or aesthetic consideration.
October 22, 2022
I read this while on the train from paris to lyon to paris to nice to marseille to paris & honestly that's what I remember about it, but I think mazzoni had some good stuff to say
January 14, 2025
8-9/10. Molto interessante.
April 13, 2025
yey en ikke så herlig første read through. må nok leses igjen. mazzoni kan også dempe name-droppinga ørlittegranne.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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