CAMBRIDGE, MA — (See æ岹ܲ online) We know what a novel is, but can we say the same about the novel? While any definition of the novel will fail us at some point, the interesting question is not what the novel is but what work the word novel does when we use it, or what reasons we may give for using it or not.
The Winter 2021 issue of æ岹ܲ “On the Novel,” guest-edited by Michael Wood (Ƶ Member; Princeton University), features fourteen essays, written by scholars with a variety of approaches and interests, that offer remarkable insights into the behavior of this versatile literary form—how old the novel actually is, shifts in dominant patterns, the art of word-play, connections between the novel and TV and videogames, and the novel in the classroom—glimpses of where and what it has been and where it may go in the future.
The full issue is available online. For questions and more information, please contact daedalus@amacad.org.
The Winter 2021 issue of æ岹ܲ “On the Novel” features the following essays:
Introduction: In This World
Michael Wood (Ƶ Member; Princeton University)
What Is It Like to Write a Novel?
Lorrie Moore (Ƶ Member; Vanderbilt University)
Two Theories
Franco Moretti (Ƶ Member; Stanford University)
Finding the Time for Ancient Novels
Simon Goldhill (Ƶ Member; University of Cambridge)
Some Endangered Feeling
Nancy Armstrong (Duke University)
Henry James in–and out of–the Classroom
Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Ƶ Member; Yale University)
The Hole in the Carpet: Henry James’s The Bostonians
Sharon Cameron (Ƶ Member; Johns Hopkins University)
“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”: (Re)Covering Black Womanhood in Porgy
Daphne A. Brooks (Yale University)
We “Other Victorians”? Novelistic Remains, Therapeutic Devices, Contemporary Televisual Dramas
Rey Chow (Ƶ Member; Duke University; University of Hong Kong) & Austin Sarfan (Duke University)
The Survival of the Unfit
Wai Chee Dimock (Yale University)
Poets in Prose: Genre & History in the Arabic Novel
Robyn Creswell (Yale University)
Organic Reformations in Richard Powers’s The Overstory
Garrett Stewart (Ƶ Member; University of Iowa)
Video Games & the Novel
Eric Hayot (Pennsylvania State University)
Losing Track of Time
Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State University)