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The Novel: An Alternative History #1
The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
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.
706 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
39 people are currently reading
1379 people want to read
About the author
Steven Moore
124 books175 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Steven Moore is a literary critic. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1988.
While Moore has been a teacher, bookstore owner, book reviewer, and columnist, he is most well known for his work as an editor and author of literary criticism. Moore is the foremost authority on William Gaddis, having written a book on this author, supervised the collection of several critical essays, and assisted in the translation of Gaddis' work into Chinese.
The wikipedia entry.
Steven Moore is a literary critic. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1988.
While Moore has been a teacher, bookstore owner, book reviewer, and columnist, he is most well known for his work as an editor and author of literary criticism. Moore is the foremost authority on William Gaddis, having written a book on this author, supervised the collection of several critical essays, and assisted in the translation of Gaddis' work into Chinese.
The wikipedia entry.
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January 22, 2016I still get regular Friend Requests from folks looking for book rec's from me. Most of my book rec's are second=hand (and much of my book knowledge will forever remain second hand). Much of my second=hand info (much of it seemingly reliable) ; it's source here in Moore's two volumes (and his reviews of course). So, just to rec to you New Friends (especially) this two-volume book of book recommendations.
Also, for you longer=term Moore=readers, I notice that the wikipedia article on him has been recently fleshed out. Good stuff in there ::
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_...
From his time as Dalkey editor, we get this list of names (following upon Markson & Alfau) :: "Moore acquired and edited a number of other writers at Dalkey — Alan Ansen, Rikki Ducornet, Carole Maso, Janice Galloway, Roger Boylan, Alexander Theroux, Susan Daitch, Aurelie Sheehan [sic! where's Arno Schmidt!] — and reprinted works by a number of his favorite writers, including Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Robert Coover, Paul West, W. M. Spackman, John Barth, William H. Gass, Joseph McElroy, Marguerite Young, and Severo Sarduy." It's a shame Moore never found an academic post ; his syllabi would've been awesome!
And his own page ::
http://stevenmoore.info/
And just as for=instance, the following two lists (one from each volume), can be found in their Listopia variants @ ::
The Shandian Spawn :: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/4...
Rabelais, His Codpiece :: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/4...
___________
GoogleBooks now has a large portion of this book available including the entire Chronological Index of Books Discussed.
Interview
Q: Could you say that we have it backwards, that what we see as normal is one current of many in terms of the way the novel has gone? We've focused so much on one subset, that has seemed to us to be the only thing?
Mr Moore: Exactly. Without question, it's the most popular form of fiction, the conventional novel, the beginning, middle, end, and all that. It's the easiest to read, has the largest appeal, blah, blah, blah. But when you step back and look at the whole stream from ancient Egypt to what's being written now, it's just a tributary that goes off to the side. I wouldn't push it too hard, but the experimental novel is actually the main river. The conventional novel is a popular sidetrack.
The introductory essay.
The beginning of Volume II regarding Don Quixote. Volume II should be published in 2013, covering the period between 1600 and 1800 including some 400 novels.
Also, for you longer=term Moore=readers, I notice that the wikipedia article on him has been recently fleshed out. Good stuff in there ::
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_...
From his time as Dalkey editor, we get this list of names (following upon Markson & Alfau) :: "Moore acquired and edited a number of other writers at Dalkey — Alan Ansen, Rikki Ducornet, Carole Maso, Janice Galloway, Roger Boylan, Alexander Theroux, Susan Daitch, Aurelie Sheehan [sic! where's Arno Schmidt!] — and reprinted works by a number of his favorite writers, including Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Robert Coover, Paul West, W. M. Spackman, John Barth, William H. Gass, Joseph McElroy, Marguerite Young, and Severo Sarduy." It's a shame Moore never found an academic post ; his syllabi would've been awesome!
And his own page ::
http://stevenmoore.info/
And just as for=instance, the following two lists (one from each volume), can be found in their Listopia variants @ ::
The Shandian Spawn :: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/4...
Rabelais, His Codpiece :: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/4...
___________
GoogleBooks now has a large portion of this book available including the entire Chronological Index of Books Discussed.
Interview
Q: Could you say that we have it backwards, that what we see as normal is one current of many in terms of the way the novel has gone? We've focused so much on one subset, that has seemed to us to be the only thing?
Mr Moore: Exactly. Without question, it's the most popular form of fiction, the conventional novel, the beginning, middle, end, and all that. It's the easiest to read, has the largest appeal, blah, blah, blah. But when you step back and look at the whole stream from ancient Egypt to what's being written now, it's just a tributary that goes off to the side. I wouldn't push it too hard, but the experimental novel is actually the main river. The conventional novel is a popular sidetrack.
The introductory essay.
The beginning of Volume II regarding Don Quixote. Volume II should be published in 2013, covering the period between 1600 and 1800 including some 400 novels.
Read
October 18, 2015
In The Novel: An Alternative History (2010) Steven Moore (b. 1951) is trying to make a polemical point: the insistence by many readers and certain literary critics that novelists conform to standards and conventions for the novel established in Europe in the 19th century is unnecessarily limiting and ignores the actual development of the novel through different times and cultures, a veritable Oceanus of a development of which the putative canonical novel is just one rivulet. To prove his point, Moore takes the reader on a guided world tour of more than three millennia's worth of fictional prose writing.
To be honest, Moore's polemics are completely unnecessary for me. For many years, my readings of serious fiction have been located well outside of the primary Western canon of the 19th and 20th centuries, and I have become as unconcerned with the proscriptions of the aesthetics underlying the Western fictional mainstream as I am with the proscriptions against shellfish in Leviticus. As far as I am concerned, writers can pull out all the stops on the nearly infinitely-stopped organ of literature they want and let it roar! Some of Moore's other polemical points about what he considers to be the uniquely disadvantaged novel, which I think are secondary to his project, are overstated; he seems to overlook how many of his assertions about the novel (which is "the only" and "no other") have parallels in other arts - I am thinking, in particular, of music and the cinema.
But no matter, for one can just ignore his polemical introduction and take the tour anyway, which is the real contribution of this text. For there are few with the temerity to try to give an overview of the world's fictional writing from the very beginnings until 1600 CE. Particularly since, as he freely admits, he is limited to reading in English.
Unlike some of the other reviewers, I am not disturbed by his very generous construal of the notion of the novel. He declines to define the novel and prefers to make an empirical examination of what exists instead of making an a priori definition and looking at what fits the definition. I find nothing objectionable there. Moore's primary point is that the Oceanus of the novel is so vast that locating its shores is difficult, in fact, futile, since the nature of the novel is to innovate and extend itself.
Though it is evident that Moore has done a great deal of research, I expect that experts in each of the literatures and ages treated in this book will have many nits to pick. Even I have some, and I'm no expert.(*) No matter, for he provides a lengthy bibliography of (translated) primary and secondary literature for anyone to deepen their understanding (and to modify Moore's presentation) of all of the literatures handled.
Whether his presentation is unimpeachable or not, Moore provides an initial orientation, a starting point for entering all of these literatures, an orientation that is certainly tendentious but is nonetheless motivational. And his eager enthusiasm for essentially all of these literatures is endearing and empowering. Clearly, most readers don't share his encyclopedic interest in the literature of every time and every place. OK, but again no matter, for you can jump over the literatures which don't seem to appeal to you to get to the next one that does - the chapters are really quite independent of each other. But perhaps his enthusiasm for a literature which never interested you before will turn out to be infectious. He certainly convinced me to read some of the medieval Gaelic yarns, to mention one example...
Although there is a great deal of plot summarization in this book, Moore offers much more: potted histories of each of the literatures, a brief comparison of the qualities of different translations of the same work and of competing secondary texts, and, for the works he considers more significant, a more detailed examination of the art of the piece, whether it be its structure, its rhetorical elements, its language (not so much there, though, since he is reading all in translation), its themes, etc., drawing out the reasons why he considers it to be of particular significance.
Personally, I am quite grateful for his chapter on Indian literature, about which I knew little more than nothing, and his chapters on Arabic and Persian literature supplement my recent tentative explorations in those literatures nicely. In fact, I found remarks of interest on nearly every page of this book.
Moore does try a bit too hard to ingratiate himself with blue side remarks, colloquial exclamations, even allusions to Seinfeld and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (!), among others, presumably with the intent to invigorate the reader's flagging attention. Misdirected effort, in my view - and the references to contemporary popular culture will assure that the book is not one for the ages. But no matter...
One needn't be so novel-besotted as Moore clearly is to benefit from this book, though I would advise a long, leisurely read with many pauses for enjoying other books, perhaps even books he has enthusiastically recommended. That's what I did.
(*) In the chapters on Japanese and Chinese literature, where I do have some previous experience, I observed some nits crawling around. There are also some probably deliberate omissions of matters I consider significant in his section on medieval Byzantine novels, to mention another. No matter, see above.
Rating
http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/943...
September 13, 2013
My thoughts on aesthetics resemble a wayward gambit. I'm keening the Mole People.
It is easier to suggest acquiring rather than methodically parsing The Novel: An Alternative History. Like the better taxonomies of old (think Burton) this is a capricious tome, rich with erudite controversy. Steven Moore's thesis is somewhat straight forward. The comprehensible/commercial novel is only one branch of an always sprawling enterprise, an often shameful hybrid, gathering and growing like some viral invader. This business of the novel did not begin, as often noted, in either England or Spain in the 17th Century. One needs to look back to BCE to find novelistic labor in a protean form. Paraphrasing Moore further, if one read all the reviewed matter up to the year 1600 one could safely wager that China would dominate the history of the novel. It didn't: why, please discuss.
There were sections I admit to skimming but others sent me scurrying to locate every work cited. Moore's work is a muddy field of entanglement, one which also boasts the higher registers of nerdy achievement.
January 16, 2021
Both volumes finished now. Below is my highly unanticipated review, as promised:
Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History is a 1,700-page study of the development of the novel, with a focus on lesser-known authors. Before reading this, I was mistakenly under the impression that, while not as widely read as I could wish, I was at least aware of the most noteworthy authors—Moore has corrected me and shown me the narrow purview of my own reading.
The idea that the novel originated with Don Quixote is completely debunked in Moore’s opus. He begins at the beginning in volume I: Beginnings to 1600. Volume II then covers 1600-1800 in mouth-watering detail. While I believe(?) the original intent was to take the development of the novel to present day, Moore ended his work at volume II—an understandable election given the exhaustive character of his study. There are books enough in The Novel to keep a bibliophile bankrupt for years to come.
And the books under Moore’s careful analysis are, often enough, difficult—that notorious descriptor the critics love to bandy about, usually sneering all the while. The first volume opens with Moore’s reaction to Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker piece “Mr. Difficult,” wherein Franzen aligns himself with these sneering critics (a betrayal: Moore sadly laments that Franzen was “one of us”). He presents the idea of a “social contract” that must exist between author and reader—that the author must do his utmost to captivate and engage the reader, perhaps at the expense of artistry. Here is where Moore takes umbrage: artistry is of paramount importance to him. He cogently reminds the reader that technical ability is appreciated in almost every field, yet ridiculed in literature. If a writer pens something challenging, he is “showing off.” If his vocabulary should exceed the quotidian, he is unnecessarily verbose (maybe even condescending—how dare he use a word that might require a peek into the dictionary). And those who read such difficult fiction are nothing but pretentious pricks, endowed with a second-to-none and entirely baseless hauteur.
Of course, Dr. Moore would heartily disagree with these assertions. What is termed “difficult” fiction today might in fact be the most recent link in the chain of a long history of alternative writings. Until the last two or three hundred years, the novel had not even fallen into the rut of normalcy; it was always changing, and the novel was novel throughout the globe.
Moore takes the reader on an impressive tour-de-force in world literature. For instance, in volume I alone, he introduces Hebrew, Icelandic, Arthurian and Japanese novels, to name a few. Of particular note are the Chinese and Japanese novels Moore analyzes. While Don Quixote is often cited as the foundation of the Western novel, the Eastern novels that came before are unjustly forgotten. The Novel helps right this wrong with its time spent on The Tale of Genji and the massive Chinese classics (see The Plum in the Golden Vase for a prime example).
If nothing above is intriguing, allow me to try once more by listing a few of the titles that grabbed me:
-Hesperus, or 45 Dog-Post-Days by Jean Paul Richter
-The Extravagant Shepherd by Charles Sorel
-The Illustrious French Lovers by Robert Challe
-Titan by Jean Paul Richter
-Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot
-Monsieur Nicolas by Nicolas-Edme Retif
-Juliette by the Marquis de Sade
-The Plum in the Golden Vase by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng
-Water Margin by Shi Nai’an
-Urania by Mary Wroth
-The History of John Bull by John Arbuthnot
-The Galesia Trilogy by Jane Barker
-The Dunciad by Alexander Pope
-Polite Conversation by Swift
-The Life of John Buncle by Thomas Amory
-Modern Chivalry by Hugh Henry Brackenridge
-Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus
-Now Voyagers by James McCourt (not formally analyzed, but mentioned in passing on a couple occasions)
-The Decameron by Boccaccio
-Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna
This is but a small selection of the hundreds and hundreds of titles Moore examines in The Novel. Read it yourself, lest you miss the fruits of our literary history.
Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History is a 1,700-page study of the development of the novel, with a focus on lesser-known authors. Before reading this, I was mistakenly under the impression that, while not as widely read as I could wish, I was at least aware of the most noteworthy authors—Moore has corrected me and shown me the narrow purview of my own reading.
The idea that the novel originated with Don Quixote is completely debunked in Moore’s opus. He begins at the beginning in volume I: Beginnings to 1600. Volume II then covers 1600-1800 in mouth-watering detail. While I believe(?) the original intent was to take the development of the novel to present day, Moore ended his work at volume II—an understandable election given the exhaustive character of his study. There are books enough in The Novel to keep a bibliophile bankrupt for years to come.
And the books under Moore’s careful analysis are, often enough, difficult—that notorious descriptor the critics love to bandy about, usually sneering all the while. The first volume opens with Moore’s reaction to Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker piece “Mr. Difficult,” wherein Franzen aligns himself with these sneering critics (a betrayal: Moore sadly laments that Franzen was “one of us”). He presents the idea of a “social contract” that must exist between author and reader—that the author must do his utmost to captivate and engage the reader, perhaps at the expense of artistry. Here is where Moore takes umbrage: artistry is of paramount importance to him. He cogently reminds the reader that technical ability is appreciated in almost every field, yet ridiculed in literature. If a writer pens something challenging, he is “showing off.” If his vocabulary should exceed the quotidian, he is unnecessarily verbose (maybe even condescending—how dare he use a word that might require a peek into the dictionary). And those who read such difficult fiction are nothing but pretentious pricks, endowed with a second-to-none and entirely baseless hauteur.
Of course, Dr. Moore would heartily disagree with these assertions. What is termed “difficult” fiction today might in fact be the most recent link in the chain of a long history of alternative writings. Until the last two or three hundred years, the novel had not even fallen into the rut of normalcy; it was always changing, and the novel was novel throughout the globe.
Moore takes the reader on an impressive tour-de-force in world literature. For instance, in volume I alone, he introduces Hebrew, Icelandic, Arthurian and Japanese novels, to name a few. Of particular note are the Chinese and Japanese novels Moore analyzes. While Don Quixote is often cited as the foundation of the Western novel, the Eastern novels that came before are unjustly forgotten. The Novel helps right this wrong with its time spent on The Tale of Genji and the massive Chinese classics (see The Plum in the Golden Vase for a prime example).
If nothing above is intriguing, allow me to try once more by listing a few of the titles that grabbed me:
-Hesperus, or 45 Dog-Post-Days by Jean Paul Richter
-The Extravagant Shepherd by Charles Sorel
-The Illustrious French Lovers by Robert Challe
-Titan by Jean Paul Richter
-Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot
-Monsieur Nicolas by Nicolas-Edme Retif
-Juliette by the Marquis de Sade
-The Plum in the Golden Vase by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng
-Water Margin by Shi Nai’an
-Urania by Mary Wroth
-The History of John Bull by John Arbuthnot
-The Galesia Trilogy by Jane Barker
-The Dunciad by Alexander Pope
-Polite Conversation by Swift
-The Life of John Buncle by Thomas Amory
-Modern Chivalry by Hugh Henry Brackenridge
-Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus
-Now Voyagers by James McCourt (not formally analyzed, but mentioned in passing on a couple occasions)
-The Decameron by Boccaccio
-Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna
This is but a small selection of the hundreds and hundreds of titles Moore examines in The Novel. Read it yourself, lest you miss the fruits of our literary history.
April 25, 2017
Please Sir, I Want Some Moore
Betwixt narrative
And index, this
Idiosyncratic,
But impeccable,
Gedenkschrift
And impressionistic,
But insightlopaedic,
List omits
Just kitchen sink,
Highlighting,
HTML and
Sub-headings.
Betwixt narrative
And index, this
Idiosyncratic,
But impeccable,
Gedenkschrift
And impressionistic,
But insightlopaedic,
List omits
Just kitchen sink,
Highlighting,
HTML and
Sub-headings.
Read
December 17, 2015I can't claim to have finished this yet, nor will I ever necessarily "finish," as I'm approaching it as a reference work, so even when I do reach the point of having read all the words, I'll probably be looking back and forth and randomly accessing. But the long-due reappraisal comes to this: In my initial attempt to be responsibly skeptical, I came down a bit on the author for his tone and for a bit of harping, but what is most important is the fact that he's absolutely right in his appraisal, and that the book contains a great wealth of information on a variety of fantastic books that the reader might not otherwise encounter in other resources--especially not in more conservative surveys of the "novel" as mainstream artifact.
If you care about reading, this volume will point you towards works that will enrich your reading experience.
(I'm still keeping earlier versions of this review-in-progress below. And I'm going to call this book "read," because otherwise I never will.)
-----------------------------
Stop the Presses! The review below is for archival purposes only... okay that plus ongoing discussion if interested. But a reappraisal is due, and I'm not sure when that will happen. I'm reading more, enjoying it in the small doses I'm getting. The next attempt to review will hopefully be better informed. Cheerio.
------Begin Archive------
Partially read, and I will continue to refer to the work periodically.
I am enjoying and disenjoying this work. It's not exactly delivering what I want, but it's worth reading. What I want is lots of enthusiasm for literature and literary possibility. I'm personally very enthusiastic about old stuff, innovative stuff, startling stuff... basically the stuff this book is about... sort of. This should in many ways be the right book for me!
But...
The author is grinding an axe constantly. He's angry that some people won't acknowledge that literature has been all over the map and literary innovation is not a post 18th-century phenomenon. All right, I take that for granted from the start.
The author is very concerned with what a novel is, and how the history of novels can be seen as supporting, legitimizing, justifying the kind of 20th century avant-garde books he likes. It seems to me that that's a fair enough jumping-off point to get this book started, but ultimately:
-Avant-gard books (or any books) don't need legitimizing/justifying. At least from my perspective.
-Just grab Satyricon, Gargantua, Tristram Shandy, and a few weird passages from the Bible, throw them on a table, and you've won the debate in thirty seconds... now let's get on with the love of great books!
-I don't actually care what a "novel" is.
Regarding this last point, I very early got tired of the struggle to determine what is or is not a novel. Re: "The Tale of Sinuhe," he writes "At least one Egyptologist feels 'it deserves to be called a novel.'" Well, okay, fine. But as I had to note "Who cares if it deserves to be called a novel?" What does "deserves" mean, anyway? Is it something I should read? Cool. Is it something that has somehow informed the development of literary writing. Cool, maybe, but basically I just want to get the enthusiasm for why it's so exciting to find and read such literature.
Some folks have complained about the "tone" of the book, and I'm sympathetic to those complaints. Paraphrasing another Goodreads reviewer, the formula of
-Religion = Time to make a snarky comment about the dullards who believe this shit,
-Sex = Woo yeah...
Well, it gets a bit much, and seems sophomoric.
And... here's a summary of a work that supports my thesis... well, your thesis is heavy-handed. Just give me books to love!
------------------------
It's possible I'm being unnecessarily cruel here. It's weird, because I think I agree with the author's thesis (but why stop here, why not bring in poetic epics, etc. too?). And there's a lot of fascinating stuff in this book that the author is revealing. He does get some enthusiasm going, and that does have an infectious quality, but it's spaced out between descriptions of works that he himself is not so enthusiastic about as literature but which suit his purpose of establishing that "novels" have existed for a long time.
I'm constantly pivoting between feeling excited to read the next section of this book, and being kind of irked by what's being delivered in the current section. I dunno... I dunno...
If you care about reading, this volume will point you towards works that will enrich your reading experience.
(I'm still keeping earlier versions of this review-in-progress below. And I'm going to call this book "read," because otherwise I never will.)
-----------------------------
Stop the Presses! The review below is for archival purposes only... okay that plus ongoing discussion if interested. But a reappraisal is due, and I'm not sure when that will happen. I'm reading more, enjoying it in the small doses I'm getting. The next attempt to review will hopefully be better informed. Cheerio.
------Begin Archive------
Partially read, and I will continue to refer to the work periodically.
I am enjoying and disenjoying this work. It's not exactly delivering what I want, but it's worth reading. What I want is lots of enthusiasm for literature and literary possibility. I'm personally very enthusiastic about old stuff, innovative stuff, startling stuff... basically the stuff this book is about... sort of. This should in many ways be the right book for me!
But...
The author is grinding an axe constantly. He's angry that some people won't acknowledge that literature has been all over the map and literary innovation is not a post 18th-century phenomenon. All right, I take that for granted from the start.
The author is very concerned with what a novel is, and how the history of novels can be seen as supporting, legitimizing, justifying the kind of 20th century avant-garde books he likes. It seems to me that that's a fair enough jumping-off point to get this book started, but ultimately:
-Avant-gard books (or any books) don't need legitimizing/justifying. At least from my perspective.
-Just grab Satyricon, Gargantua, Tristram Shandy, and a few weird passages from the Bible, throw them on a table, and you've won the debate in thirty seconds... now let's get on with the love of great books!
-I don't actually care what a "novel" is.
Regarding this last point, I very early got tired of the struggle to determine what is or is not a novel. Re: "The Tale of Sinuhe," he writes "At least one Egyptologist feels 'it deserves to be called a novel.'" Well, okay, fine. But as I had to note "Who cares if it deserves to be called a novel?" What does "deserves" mean, anyway? Is it something I should read? Cool. Is it something that has somehow informed the development of literary writing. Cool, maybe, but basically I just want to get the enthusiasm for why it's so exciting to find and read such literature.
Some folks have complained about the "tone" of the book, and I'm sympathetic to those complaints. Paraphrasing another Goodreads reviewer, the formula of
-Religion = Time to make a snarky comment about the dullards who believe this shit,
-Sex = Woo yeah...
Well, it gets a bit much, and seems sophomoric.
And... here's a summary of a work that supports my thesis... well, your thesis is heavy-handed. Just give me books to love!
------------------------
It's possible I'm being unnecessarily cruel here. It's weird, because I think I agree with the author's thesis (but why stop here, why not bring in poetic epics, etc. too?). And there's a lot of fascinating stuff in this book that the author is revealing. He does get some enthusiasm going, and that does have an infectious quality, but it's spaced out between descriptions of works that he himself is not so enthusiastic about as literature but which suit his purpose of establishing that "novels" have existed for a long time.
I'm constantly pivoting between feeling excited to read the next section of this book, and being kind of irked by what's being delivered in the current section. I dunno... I dunno...
November 17, 2010
Written in an informal, almost conversational style, Moore supports his argument that (contrary to some current critics' arguments) the post-modern literary novel is not a sudden and disappointing path some modern authors have stumbled down but is rather part of a long-standing, world-wide tradition of the novel as an experimental art form with a whirlwind tour through the history of the novel. This first (!) volume starts in ancient times and works its way up through the sixteenth century, wending its way around the globe from Europe to the Middle East then on to India, Japan and China (with a brief stop in Meso-America). This book is fantastic and funny - though the religiously sensitive may want to avoid it, as Moore can come across like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins on a particularly cranky day (which I enjoy but may come across as insensitive or downright offensive) - and has inspired me to set aside all of next year to read a selection of "writerly" novels that span both the chronological and geographical spectrums. I cannot wait for the second volume. Oh, and it has footnotes - so many lovely, informative footnotes, one of which even name-checks E. Lockhart's The Boy Book, showing the breadth of Moore's own knowledge of books. The only real downfall I can see is that many of the novels I now really want to read seem difficult to find.
October 10, 2014
Notorious bore Robert McCrum shattered monocles nationwide when he scandalously placed John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in the #1 slot of his latest trudge through the "definitive 100 novels written in English." It was an adorable attempt to break from tradition, with all the rebellious glee of a child who switches the salad fork with the fish fork when Father isn't looking (before guiltily and immediately switching it back: Robinson Crusoe shuffles awkwardly into the dining room at #2, frantically tucking in his shirt and muttering fervid apologies for being late). One irate commenter scornfully noted that this was shaping up to be the Guardian's same old song and dance, pointing anyone who wasn't merely there for self-congratulation ("Ah! I've read all of these already! Very good, then.") in the direction of Moore's Alternative History. So I picked it up.
The introduction is electrical. Moore's informality is a lot of fun and his central thesis works as an effective abstergent to the crummy McCrummite chronicle that many will pick up (might even say "catch") in the course of a literature degree: that the novel's birth certificate is situated within the heyday of mercantile capitalism and its swansong in the rise of 20th-century fascism. In 35 pages Moore forcibly evicted me from the cobwebby mindset where anything resembling a novel before Defoe is actually something else and everything after Ulysses is merely a "a series of footnotes." A wonderful overture, then, but some nagging objections accumulated throughout the book that I couldn't ignore. Three points to make, won't keep you long.
Moore indicates early on that he won't be bothering his readers with any newfangled academic nonsense: "I'm reluctant to cite any French literary theorists ... 40 years ago they sashayed over like flirty foreign exchange students and began seducing English and American critics into making fools of themselves." Cutting through the thicket of abstraction and rhetoric, Moore returns from the temple of literary theory with only one concept deemed important enough for his purpose - Barthes' distinction between readerly and writerly texts - and even this is deployed sparingly. Here we're much more concerned with universal, human themes: love and lust, desire and pleasure, family and friendship, body and self, mind and madness, ethics and politics. It's hard to watch Moore gleefully deriding those silly Gallic obscurantists without wanting to point out that Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida et al. published extensively on all of the topics listed above, with far more profundity and reverence for their subject matter than any smug American or sneering Briton after 1960 ever did. Even allowing for the possibility that he's intentionally eliding this fact as a sophist ploy, it's still baffling to find anti-theory sentiment in a book that will, at every turn, insist that difficulty is a virtue rather than a deficiency.
The above quotation is also indicative of Moore's not-infrequently discomfiting stance towards feminist criticism and theory. Flippantly brushing off the accusation of misogyny sometimes leveled at Boccaccio's writing, he claims that "an owl-eyed feminist critic can find misogyny in any man's work." I'm struggling to think why he thought a statement like that would improve his book. Even if it was intended as a joke it reeks of a particularly noxious strand of faux-allyship - "Hey, I'm all for equal rights! But can't you girls take it down a notch?" - and it's only one wince-inducing example among many scattered throughout the text. Here's Moore's take on Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, completed when the author was in her 30s: "a miscellany of observations, poetry, dramatized scenes, and lists of likes and dislikes - superficially resembling a modern teenage girl's diary or MyFace profile." Yikes.
It should be said that Moore nearly always convinced me that the novels under discussion are stimulating, vibrant, essential, and absolutely worth the time it takes to track down and read them. It's just a shame his own prose veers between stodgy description and cringeworthy "hip" slang. I frequently found my eyes glazing over and my mind wandering in the middle of a dense, glib explanation, only to be jolted back to awareness by a phrase like "dig this." Stylistically speaking, his tendency to summarise with only a sprinkling of interpretation and elucidation lies somewhere between an over-embellished Wikipedia entry and an excitable friend who's just discovered, oh my god, the best book that you just have to read and let me tell you all about what happens in it. Remember the chummy jokey wink-wink-nudge-nudge tone I extolled earlier when it was in the introduction? It really starts to grate after 400 pages, especially when he reaches Eastern and Far Eastern literature, traditions, and customs in chapters 4 and 5, where whiffs of cultural imperialism assault the nose.
I can't emphasise enough that I'm honing in excessively on the negative and that there's a lot to commend in Moore's study. Not enough critics are willing to pin the university curriculum's lazy hagiography of middle-class English-speaking writers to the bullseye of their dartboard, at least not to the extent found here. You'll also find it an immense relief if you're the type to lose sleep over buying the wrong edition of a non-English text. Moore always offers a concise but informative footnote on translations, which is especially useful in cases where many are available, like Gargantua and Pantagruel or the 1,001 Nights.
There are two occasions in the book where Moore seems to let himself go for a couple of pages and starts listing his favourite novels and novelists: once as a way of showing the pervasive influence of Rabelais on the history of fiction up to the 21st-century, and later to display the vast amount of non-traditional forms and structures the novel can assume. It's all towards proving his thesis that experimentation and innovation are inbuilt features, not aberrations, of the novel, but mostly I enjoyed these breathless catalogues for the reading list I got out of it. Then again, if it was a reading list I was after, I could've simply photocopied the chronological index and bibliography, an idea that hit me all too late but one I'll be implementing for the 1000-page second volume.
Short note: Moore falls into the seemingly irrepressible school of criticism that obsessively extracts a tedious self-referential message about The Role of the Author and The Creation of Literature from every single novel ever written, and regards it as the pinnacle of all themes that writers have treated throughout history. I suppose an owl-eyed postmodernist can find metafiction in any text.
The introduction is electrical. Moore's informality is a lot of fun and his central thesis works as an effective abstergent to the crummy McCrummite chronicle that many will pick up (might even say "catch") in the course of a literature degree: that the novel's birth certificate is situated within the heyday of mercantile capitalism and its swansong in the rise of 20th-century fascism. In 35 pages Moore forcibly evicted me from the cobwebby mindset where anything resembling a novel before Defoe is actually something else and everything after Ulysses is merely a "a series of footnotes." A wonderful overture, then, but some nagging objections accumulated throughout the book that I couldn't ignore. Three points to make, won't keep you long.
Moore indicates early on that he won't be bothering his readers with any newfangled academic nonsense: "I'm reluctant to cite any French literary theorists ... 40 years ago they sashayed over like flirty foreign exchange students and began seducing English and American critics into making fools of themselves." Cutting through the thicket of abstraction and rhetoric, Moore returns from the temple of literary theory with only one concept deemed important enough for his purpose - Barthes' distinction between readerly and writerly texts - and even this is deployed sparingly. Here we're much more concerned with universal, human themes: love and lust, desire and pleasure, family and friendship, body and self, mind and madness, ethics and politics. It's hard to watch Moore gleefully deriding those silly Gallic obscurantists without wanting to point out that Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida et al. published extensively on all of the topics listed above, with far more profundity and reverence for their subject matter than any smug American or sneering Briton after 1960 ever did. Even allowing for the possibility that he's intentionally eliding this fact as a sophist ploy, it's still baffling to find anti-theory sentiment in a book that will, at every turn, insist that difficulty is a virtue rather than a deficiency.
The above quotation is also indicative of Moore's not-infrequently discomfiting stance towards feminist criticism and theory. Flippantly brushing off the accusation of misogyny sometimes leveled at Boccaccio's writing, he claims that "an owl-eyed feminist critic can find misogyny in any man's work." I'm struggling to think why he thought a statement like that would improve his book. Even if it was intended as a joke it reeks of a particularly noxious strand of faux-allyship - "Hey, I'm all for equal rights! But can't you girls take it down a notch?" - and it's only one wince-inducing example among many scattered throughout the text. Here's Moore's take on Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, completed when the author was in her 30s: "a miscellany of observations, poetry, dramatized scenes, and lists of likes and dislikes - superficially resembling a modern teenage girl's diary or MyFace profile." Yikes.
It should be said that Moore nearly always convinced me that the novels under discussion are stimulating, vibrant, essential, and absolutely worth the time it takes to track down and read them. It's just a shame his own prose veers between stodgy description and cringeworthy "hip" slang. I frequently found my eyes glazing over and my mind wandering in the middle of a dense, glib explanation, only to be jolted back to awareness by a phrase like "dig this." Stylistically speaking, his tendency to summarise with only a sprinkling of interpretation and elucidation lies somewhere between an over-embellished Wikipedia entry and an excitable friend who's just discovered, oh my god, the best book that you just have to read and let me tell you all about what happens in it. Remember the chummy jokey wink-wink-nudge-nudge tone I extolled earlier when it was in the introduction? It really starts to grate after 400 pages, especially when he reaches Eastern and Far Eastern literature, traditions, and customs in chapters 4 and 5, where whiffs of cultural imperialism assault the nose.
I can't emphasise enough that I'm honing in excessively on the negative and that there's a lot to commend in Moore's study. Not enough critics are willing to pin the university curriculum's lazy hagiography of middle-class English-speaking writers to the bullseye of their dartboard, at least not to the extent found here. You'll also find it an immense relief if you're the type to lose sleep over buying the wrong edition of a non-English text. Moore always offers a concise but informative footnote on translations, which is especially useful in cases where many are available, like Gargantua and Pantagruel or the 1,001 Nights.
There are two occasions in the book where Moore seems to let himself go for a couple of pages and starts listing his favourite novels and novelists: once as a way of showing the pervasive influence of Rabelais on the history of fiction up to the 21st-century, and later to display the vast amount of non-traditional forms and structures the novel can assume. It's all towards proving his thesis that experimentation and innovation are inbuilt features, not aberrations, of the novel, but mostly I enjoyed these breathless catalogues for the reading list I got out of it. Then again, if it was a reading list I was after, I could've simply photocopied the chronological index and bibliography, an idea that hit me all too late but one I'll be implementing for the 1000-page second volume.
Short note: Moore falls into the seemingly irrepressible school of criticism that obsessively extracts a tedious self-referential message about The Role of the Author and The Creation of Literature from every single novel ever written, and regards it as the pinnacle of all themes that writers have treated throughout history. I suppose an owl-eyed postmodernist can find metafiction in any text.
February 25, 2011
Moore successfully blows up the standard simplistic history of the novel, only to offer in its place a view of the novel that is often just as simplistic. His entire aesthetic boils down to rejoicing any time a narrative is disjointed, bawdy, discursive, “experimental.” His aesthetic depends on the crude aesthetic of those traditionalists he’s writing against. Both sides draw a neat (and nonexistent) line separating one supposed type of fiction from another supposed type. It’s an aesthetic that doesn’t stand on its own.
Here’s the standard history of the novel Moore undermines: The novel was born in the 18th century in England. From here, Nature took its course and things ripened and led to the novels of Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, James, et al. Then something went wrong: “Things got a little out of hand during the 1920s and 1930s [Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner] but soon settled back on track, though not before spawning a lunatic fringe that still remains.... Today, our best novelists follow in this great tradition: that is, realistic narrative driven by strong plot, peopled by well-rounded characters struggling with serious ethical issues, conveyed in language anyone can understand....”
Here’s Moore’s one-word response to this history: “Wrong.” The rest of the book attempts to elaborate on this stance. Moore’s history of the novel is portrayed strictly in terms of this contemporary squabble between a handful of critics and academics about the current direction of fiction.
(And concerning this debate between “traditionalists” and the “avant-gardeists”: Do authors like Pynchon and Delillo really need defending? Does anyone really care if airheads like Dale Peck don’t like Delillo, or if Franzen writes an emo-essay about how “difficult” authors should be more considerate to their readers?)
There are parts of the Introduction that knock it out of the park. Moore maintains that the novel has been around for over two thousand years, that its aim has always been to offer something new (hence its name), untraditional, and extraordinary. He has some solid references to back up an alternate view of the novel’s history. And ancient literature speaks for itself: Oddball narration, fantastical events, innovative narrative techniques, and metafiction have always been a part of fiction, from Gilgamesh on. Moore does a good job of arguing that the line that separates the “novel” from older romances, sagas, tales, pastorals, legends, acts, picaresques, and epics (all in quotation marks) is often hazy and perhaps nonexistent.
Then there is the rest of the book: Though much of it is very interesting and informative, it’s still just hundreds of pages of plot summary after plot summary, with interjections of excitement any time Moore can use a piece to supports his partisan, temporally-contingent outlook.
And it doesn’t take long for Moore’s devastating predictability to announce itself: Whenever there’s something religious in a piece of fiction, you can expect a bunch of flippant jokes. Whenever there’s something sexual, you can expect a Yee-haw! Now that’s more like it! His brand of formulaic irreverence towards religion works fine on TV or in works of pop atheism, but in a work that purports to piece together a history of narrative techniques, it’s remiss.
The problem is that Moore doesn’t make any effort to empathize with ancient cultures, and this makes him unsuited to write a book like this.
Or rather, he thinks that no effort is needed. His historical worldview is radically parochial. Each piece of writing, whether it’s from ancient Egypt or medieval France, is judged against current-day (urban/intellectual) standards of propriety. You get only the weakest historical/cultural contexts of the works covered in this book, such as how he pretentiously refers to Jesus as Yeshua bin Yosef in a shallow attempt to display how “exotic” the ancient world was. This is the extent to which Moore pushes himself to relate to that world: showing us how crazy their names were.
Because the entire book depends on it, Moore is quick to make any correspondence he can between an ancient book and a twentieth-century “experimental” novel. Many of these comparisons are weak, to put it mildly. Concerning a thirteenth-century mystical novel written in Hebrew, he claims that the book is misunderstood and that it’s really “in the same spirit” as Keroauc’s characters in On the Road digging sax solos while cruising America. A scene from an Egyptian scrap written in 1800 BCE on a piece of stone is claimed to be “like something out of Kafka or Borges” because it involves a character’s returning to court and finding that no one has aged (if you accept this lazy level of comparison, then anytime you’re standing in a line, not to mention all fairy tales, can be referred to as “Kafkaesque”). An ancient Mesopotamian hymn opens with a description of the city of Kullab that “almost sounds like Saul Bellow’s Chicago.” This last one torpedoed any faith I had in Moore: this opening paragraph is given in full; it does not (no surprise) read anything like Bellow.
Moore’s complete lack of nuance makes him sound mentally unbalanced at times. Here he is discussing whether or not sections of writing within the book of Genesis and the book of Samuel should be considered novels: “But of course they’re fiction; otherwise they must be classified as religious propaganda, pious frauds perpetrated by self-serving priests who rewrote history as perniciously as Soviet historians rewrote theirs in the last century and with a similar totalitarian agenda.”
Steven Moore, King of the Anachronism!
The book is rounded out with secular/atheist platitudes, such as the following: “One shouldn’t need the promise of heaven or the threat of damnation to act decently.”
Here’s the standard history of the novel Moore undermines: The novel was born in the 18th century in England. From here, Nature took its course and things ripened and led to the novels of Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, James, et al. Then something went wrong: “Things got a little out of hand during the 1920s and 1930s [Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner] but soon settled back on track, though not before spawning a lunatic fringe that still remains.... Today, our best novelists follow in this great tradition: that is, realistic narrative driven by strong plot, peopled by well-rounded characters struggling with serious ethical issues, conveyed in language anyone can understand....”
Here’s Moore’s one-word response to this history: “Wrong.” The rest of the book attempts to elaborate on this stance. Moore’s history of the novel is portrayed strictly in terms of this contemporary squabble between a handful of critics and academics about the current direction of fiction.
(And concerning this debate between “traditionalists” and the “avant-gardeists”: Do authors like Pynchon and Delillo really need defending? Does anyone really care if airheads like Dale Peck don’t like Delillo, or if Franzen writes an emo-essay about how “difficult” authors should be more considerate to their readers?)
There are parts of the Introduction that knock it out of the park. Moore maintains that the novel has been around for over two thousand years, that its aim has always been to offer something new (hence its name), untraditional, and extraordinary. He has some solid references to back up an alternate view of the novel’s history. And ancient literature speaks for itself: Oddball narration, fantastical events, innovative narrative techniques, and metafiction have always been a part of fiction, from Gilgamesh on. Moore does a good job of arguing that the line that separates the “novel” from older romances, sagas, tales, pastorals, legends, acts, picaresques, and epics (all in quotation marks) is often hazy and perhaps nonexistent.
Then there is the rest of the book: Though much of it is very interesting and informative, it’s still just hundreds of pages of plot summary after plot summary, with interjections of excitement any time Moore can use a piece to supports his partisan, temporally-contingent outlook.
And it doesn’t take long for Moore’s devastating predictability to announce itself: Whenever there’s something religious in a piece of fiction, you can expect a bunch of flippant jokes. Whenever there’s something sexual, you can expect a Yee-haw! Now that’s more like it! His brand of formulaic irreverence towards religion works fine on TV or in works of pop atheism, but in a work that purports to piece together a history of narrative techniques, it’s remiss.
The problem is that Moore doesn’t make any effort to empathize with ancient cultures, and this makes him unsuited to write a book like this.
Or rather, he thinks that no effort is needed. His historical worldview is radically parochial. Each piece of writing, whether it’s from ancient Egypt or medieval France, is judged against current-day (urban/intellectual) standards of propriety. You get only the weakest historical/cultural contexts of the works covered in this book, such as how he pretentiously refers to Jesus as Yeshua bin Yosef in a shallow attempt to display how “exotic” the ancient world was. This is the extent to which Moore pushes himself to relate to that world: showing us how crazy their names were.
Because the entire book depends on it, Moore is quick to make any correspondence he can between an ancient book and a twentieth-century “experimental” novel. Many of these comparisons are weak, to put it mildly. Concerning a thirteenth-century mystical novel written in Hebrew, he claims that the book is misunderstood and that it’s really “in the same spirit” as Keroauc’s characters in On the Road digging sax solos while cruising America. A scene from an Egyptian scrap written in 1800 BCE on a piece of stone is claimed to be “like something out of Kafka or Borges” because it involves a character’s returning to court and finding that no one has aged (if you accept this lazy level of comparison, then anytime you’re standing in a line, not to mention all fairy tales, can be referred to as “Kafkaesque”). An ancient Mesopotamian hymn opens with a description of the city of Kullab that “almost sounds like Saul Bellow’s Chicago.” This last one torpedoed any faith I had in Moore: this opening paragraph is given in full; it does not (no surprise) read anything like Bellow.
Moore’s complete lack of nuance makes him sound mentally unbalanced at times. Here he is discussing whether or not sections of writing within the book of Genesis and the book of Samuel should be considered novels: “But of course they’re fiction; otherwise they must be classified as religious propaganda, pious frauds perpetrated by self-serving priests who rewrote history as perniciously as Soviet historians rewrote theirs in the last century and with a similar totalitarian agenda.”
Steven Moore, King of the Anachronism!
The book is rounded out with secular/atheist platitudes, such as the following: “One shouldn’t need the promise of heaven or the threat of damnation to act decently.”
May 16, 2022
Great book. Essential reading.
June 30, 2017
If you've followed my updates as I read this, you may be surprised by the application of 4-stars. But the fact of the matter is, the problem with the book wasn't the book, but rather my expectations for the book. What you have here is not a really deep analytical treatise on the execution of experimental writing, so much as an insanely huge survey of significant experimental pieces of literature through the ages to assert a single, dominant argument: the novel has been and always will be an artful document, driven by experimental means.
It's not necessarily a new theory to apply to the world of art--music, visual art, etc. have all always been driven by the most radical of actors, often appreciated and accepted (sometimes not always during their time, though that changed mostly in the mid-late 20th siècle) much unlike their literary counterparts. What's special to me is that this argument is often ignored for literature. Moore's 30-star-worthy introduction to this book even calls attention to this weird and stupid paradox: that we find "difficulty" in fiction a perversion and (ugh) "pretentious" (side note: is there a dumber, more reductive way to dismiss a book? like, when I see the application of this word, 99.99% of the time, I'm sure that the person either, 1) lacked the intellectual rigor to say something insightful about why the book failed for them, or 2) have an ego that was so damaged by the book's intellectual power [proving they're not as smart as they thought, or something, which is also dumb] that they need to lash out and suggest that others who did engage with it positively are fundamentally flawed in their tastes--e.g. the Franzen argument about J R) rather than a celebration of talent in contrast to the ways we see challenging athletic feats in events like the Olympics, etc. where difficulty is lauded. It's beyond the strain of anti-intellectualism in America's DNA, because this is a global kind of aversion. It might have something to do with human psychology? I dunno. Either way, Moore gets it, and skillfully exposes the severe, fatal flaws in the arguments from repugnant dweebs of the literati like Franzen who vomited up one of the dumbest, worst arguments for literature's social-place to be more middle-of-the-road (DON'T SEE his "Mr. Difficult" essay).
Anyway, more Moore will always be good. My biggest beef with this essential tome is just that he kills the premise in his own intro: He basically says, "who gives a fuck about a plot," (my fist uncontrollable shot into the air) but then he proceeds to spend the next n-hundred pages hyper-focused on explicating the weird plots in extreme detail, to that point that this here I-don't-read-for-plot reader felt like Moore was ruining the books/texts for me. To that end, I spent most of the book really hoping he would have slashed the amount of summary and focused more on maybe a specific few elements from the text to map those elements' trajectory through literature to show how these experimental forms from on ancient inform the experimental (and even pulp-y) forms of today.
Again, this here's a vital book that makes one of the grandest arguments for experimental writing on the block. But just be ready: it's more of a survey of literature, rather than an analysis or even criticism. The intro, however, is required reading for any and all litterateurs.
It's not necessarily a new theory to apply to the world of art--music, visual art, etc. have all always been driven by the most radical of actors, often appreciated and accepted (sometimes not always during their time, though that changed mostly in the mid-late 20th siècle) much unlike their literary counterparts. What's special to me is that this argument is often ignored for literature. Moore's 30-star-worthy introduction to this book even calls attention to this weird and stupid paradox: that we find "difficulty" in fiction a perversion and (ugh) "pretentious" (side note: is there a dumber, more reductive way to dismiss a book? like, when I see the application of this word, 99.99% of the time, I'm sure that the person either, 1) lacked the intellectual rigor to say something insightful about why the book failed for them, or 2) have an ego that was so damaged by the book's intellectual power [proving they're not as smart as they thought, or something, which is also dumb] that they need to lash out and suggest that others who did engage with it positively are fundamentally flawed in their tastes--e.g. the Franzen argument about J R) rather than a celebration of talent in contrast to the ways we see challenging athletic feats in events like the Olympics, etc. where difficulty is lauded. It's beyond the strain of anti-intellectualism in America's DNA, because this is a global kind of aversion. It might have something to do with human psychology? I dunno. Either way, Moore gets it, and skillfully exposes the severe, fatal flaws in the arguments from repugnant dweebs of the literati like Franzen who vomited up one of the dumbest, worst arguments for literature's social-place to be more middle-of-the-road (DON'T SEE his "Mr. Difficult" essay).
Anyway, more Moore will always be good. My biggest beef with this essential tome is just that he kills the premise in his own intro: He basically says, "who gives a fuck about a plot," (my fist uncontrollable shot into the air) but then he proceeds to spend the next n-hundred pages hyper-focused on explicating the weird plots in extreme detail, to that point that this here I-don't-read-for-plot reader felt like Moore was ruining the books/texts for me. To that end, I spent most of the book really hoping he would have slashed the amount of summary and focused more on maybe a specific few elements from the text to map those elements' trajectory through literature to show how these experimental forms from on ancient inform the experimental (and even pulp-y) forms of today.
Again, this here's a vital book that makes one of the grandest arguments for experimental writing on the block. But just be ready: it's more of a survey of literature, rather than an analysis or even criticism. The intro, however, is required reading for any and all litterateurs.
July 24, 2017
In many ways the book I've always wanted to read about the novel. Every newly-enrolled university literature major should be forced to read it before stepping into any classroom--especially mine. I so wish I'd read this 40 years ago before I stepped into that first classroom and began being confused with irrelevant detail before I was ever given "the big picture." Can't wait to get on to Vol. II!
September 21, 2014
The history of how the novel(s) in your hands came into being... Utterly fascinating, spellbinding and compelling. So much detail... // full review gestating //
June 21, 2015
one of the most enjoyable and informative books i've read in some time--probably my favorite of this year, thus far. his constant shitting on religion gets a bit tiresome, like a teenage militant atheist (might or might not have been one of these myself, once upon a time...), but other than that it's a calliope of wonder and the written word. you thought you were literate, perhaps, but truly you were not. great footnotes, also. i see myself giving away many gift copies.
August 13, 2010
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Regular readers know that for the last three years now, I've been exploring the history of the novel format in my CCLaP 100 essay series; so I was excited about coming across volume 1 of Steven Moore's own grandly ambitious new history of the novel, in which over 2000 pages he will eventually be exploring the entire grand tapestry of narrative fictional long-form stories over the course of the last twelve thousand years, with this first volume covering from the dawn of writing in Mesopotamia around 10,000 BC to essentially the Western Renaissance of 1400 to 1600 AD. But there's a big problem with Moore's book, a problem that you notice right off the bat, which is that he apparently created no limits whatsoever for what he was going to include here as examples of "novels" -- he counts the Bible and other religious texts as novels, for example, and epic poetry, and any historical biography containing even a trace of mythology (sheesh, no wonder this first volume is 700 pages just on its own), making this survey of them more aptly named A History of Every Single Thing A Human Being Has Ever Written Down, which might be interesting but is for sure not what I wanted to read when I picked up a book called The Novel: An Alternative History.
But still, such a thing might not be so terribly bad in the right analyst's hands; but here, Moore barely scratches the surface of the historical, sociological and anthropological circumstances that were influencing these projects at the times they were written, and instead spends the majority of the text doing simple plot recaps of the cited stories, and then comparing them with an insulting "see? see?" attitude to a bunch of snotty, smartypants academic novels from the 20th century, making the entire thing more a book to be begrudgingly tolerated in a class assignment than a legitimately enjoyable NPR-style pleasure read. And speaking of which, then there's that inexplicable introduction, in which Moore spends 35 pages not talking about anything from the book at all, but rather delivering a preachy lecture attempting to justify the ultra-challenging smartypants authors of the Postmodernist period (which I guess should come as no surprise -- Moore is considered the world's leading expert on ultra-challenging Postmodernist author William Gaddis, which he conveniently reminds us of over and over and over), which once you get past the dozens of footnotes can essentially be summed up as, "Ah, you f-cking mouth-breathers just don't get it," a sad and defensive screed that should've been entirely cut by his editors before this book ever saw the light of day. I'm tempted to say that it's a book only a professor can love, but it's not even that; it's only the most d-ckishly obscure, detestably arcane professors who could possibly love this waste of dead trees, and I think we should all say a little prayer for those poor unsuspecting University of Michigan undergraduates who are going to have to bewilderedly deal with Moore in their American Lit 101 courses next fall.
Out of 10: 2.2
Regular readers know that for the last three years now, I've been exploring the history of the novel format in my CCLaP 100 essay series; so I was excited about coming across volume 1 of Steven Moore's own grandly ambitious new history of the novel, in which over 2000 pages he will eventually be exploring the entire grand tapestry of narrative fictional long-form stories over the course of the last twelve thousand years, with this first volume covering from the dawn of writing in Mesopotamia around 10,000 BC to essentially the Western Renaissance of 1400 to 1600 AD. But there's a big problem with Moore's book, a problem that you notice right off the bat, which is that he apparently created no limits whatsoever for what he was going to include here as examples of "novels" -- he counts the Bible and other religious texts as novels, for example, and epic poetry, and any historical biography containing even a trace of mythology (sheesh, no wonder this first volume is 700 pages just on its own), making this survey of them more aptly named A History of Every Single Thing A Human Being Has Ever Written Down, which might be interesting but is for sure not what I wanted to read when I picked up a book called The Novel: An Alternative History.
But still, such a thing might not be so terribly bad in the right analyst's hands; but here, Moore barely scratches the surface of the historical, sociological and anthropological circumstances that were influencing these projects at the times they were written, and instead spends the majority of the text doing simple plot recaps of the cited stories, and then comparing them with an insulting "see? see?" attitude to a bunch of snotty, smartypants academic novels from the 20th century, making the entire thing more a book to be begrudgingly tolerated in a class assignment than a legitimately enjoyable NPR-style pleasure read. And speaking of which, then there's that inexplicable introduction, in which Moore spends 35 pages not talking about anything from the book at all, but rather delivering a preachy lecture attempting to justify the ultra-challenging smartypants authors of the Postmodernist period (which I guess should come as no surprise -- Moore is considered the world's leading expert on ultra-challenging Postmodernist author William Gaddis, which he conveniently reminds us of over and over and over), which once you get past the dozens of footnotes can essentially be summed up as, "Ah, you f-cking mouth-breathers just don't get it," a sad and defensive screed that should've been entirely cut by his editors before this book ever saw the light of day. I'm tempted to say that it's a book only a professor can love, but it's not even that; it's only the most d-ckishly obscure, detestably arcane professors who could possibly love this waste of dead trees, and I think we should all say a little prayer for those poor unsuspecting University of Michigan undergraduates who are going to have to bewilderedly deal with Moore in their American Lit 101 courses next fall.
Out of 10: 2.2
August 12, 2012
I can't express how good this is. Steven Moore's huge history of the novel and its predecessors goes up against the way we've been taught--that the novel begins in England in the 18th century--by exploring a dizzying number of its versions and ancestors. All of this is done in a funny, accessible, and always interesting style. Yes, Moore has read a lot (this is Volume I, and has already provided me a reading list I can't complete in a lifetime); however, I didn't have to know them all, because his summaries and descriptions of these ancient pieces of fiction give you hundreds of options of books you could hunt down, read, and enjoy. I'm a huge fan already. Read this, or at least dip into it: it's going to keep me occupied through the summer.
July 1, 2014
Such a vast, erudite, ambitious, encyclopedic work as this deserves applause. Steven Moore was once the editor of Dalkey Archive Press, one of the best publishers around, and his goal of showing that many so-called "innovations" of modern novels are actually quite ancient might come as old news to many seasoned readers, but he handily succeeds at showing why this literary heritage matters in a reading environment where sophisticated fiction often struggles. His enthusiasm for the project, the vast range of material he's gone through, and his highlighting of countless forgotten or unknown books (sure to be news to even the most hardcore bibliophiles) will be extremely welcome to anyone whose reading list just isn't long enough, or who wants a quick tour through basically all of world literature until the year 1600.
Moore begins his introduction by defending the concept of "difficult fiction", as distinguished from more mass-market fare. I personally read a decent amount of stuff that would be in the first category and am fine with my marginal place in the broader bibliosphere. I have no interest in either justifying my tastes to YA readers, or, in the other direction, engaging in semantic quibbling with other niche readers about what "really" qualifies as high-end reading. Literature, like everything else, exists on a continuum, and so everyone will have their own definition of what's "difficult", and will also find their tastes shifting around on that spectrum from time to time. Many readers and even writers have an issue with those upmarket books, however, and Moore collects some fairly dim criticism from a few of our esteemed contemporary critics and authors like BR Myers, Dale Peck, and Jonathan Franzen complaining that authors of big experimental novels are being pretentious, alienating themselves from readers, engaging in obscurantism for its own sake, and so on.
Moore rightly points out that those criticisms are usually silly and typically motivated by either ignorance, a chip on the shoulder, or in the case of novelists like Franzen, perhaps professional jealousy. The flashy techniques and unconventional stylings of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Pale Fire, The Recognitions, etc. that can frustrate some readers aren't there specifically to intimidate anyone, they're there because the authors wanted to do something cool for those who would appreciate that sort of thing. Moore relates an amusing story of one of his students who exhibited that same skeptical spirit:
"I once taught Nabokov's story 'The Vane Sisters' to some undergraduates, and when I showed on the chalkboard how the initial letters of the words in the final paragraph of the story form an acrostic spelling out a message, a female student exploded with rage, as though a dirty trick had been performed on her. (I reacted with amazed delight when I first learned of Nabokov's gambit; imagine how difficult it must have been to compose that paragraph, even working in the word "acrostics" into his acrostic!)"
That student's reaction is, at its heart, identical to the sentiments of all these writers who just can't stand the thought of people producing art that not everyone will enjoy or appreciate. Perhaps it's better, from one perspective, to be a Dickens than a Joyce, but there's room enough on the bookshelf for both of them. While there are of course snobbier readers with the mirror-image disdain for anything mass market or too popular, not only are those people far fewer in number, but even the most devoted literary aesthete started off his career reading popular stuff, whereas very few anti-snobs even give the more challenging stuff a chance, perhaps due to lingering unpleasant school memories of being forced to dissect books like dead cats. The ultimate lesson is simple and obvious: if you don't like something, then don't read it, and don't waste your life pathetically writing tons of words about those who do.
Having dispatched those dullards, Moore devotes the main text to illuminating the surprising variety and innovation of novelists from most of the regions of the world. It's organized like so:
Chapter 1 is The Ancient Novel, covering Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian novels.
Chapter 2 is The Medieval Novel, covering Irish, Icelandic, Byzantine, Jewish, and Arthurian novels.
Chapter 3 is The Renaissance Novel, covering Italian, Spanish, French, and English novels.
The Interlude is The Mesoamerican Novel, which is a sadly brief chapter due to the unconscionable destruction of almost all indigenous literary works following European conquest.
Chapter 4 is The Eastern Novel, covering Indian, Tibetan, Arabic, and Persian novels.
Chapter 5 is The Far Eastern Novel, covering Japanese and Chinese novels.
In an occasionally repetitive but never boring fashion, Moore reviews the plots and stylistic innovations of a dizzying number of books, the vast majority of which I'd never heard of. The extensive space given to plot summaries seems to have struck some reviewers as unnecessary; I found them not only useful but crucial, given the difficulty of drawing connections between centuries of world literature without making it clear which elements subsequent generations found important. Without his explanation of what was important in The Book of Genji, for example, Japanese literature would be nearly unintelligible, and his discussion of its feminist legacy was fascinating. Even more familiar literary histories get dazzlingly detailed investigations; his discussion of the links between the Arthurian mythos and the Tristan and Isolde story is a marvel of scholarship and insight, to say nothing of his explication of the origins of the famous Thousand and One Nights, so vital not only to Arabic fiction but also our own. I'm going to need a wheelbarrow to cart all the Chinese novels he mentions away from the library.
There are only two minor weaknesses of the book. One is that Moore is anti-religious to the point of obnoxiousness. I'm an atheist, so I agree with him about the cloying sanctimony of a lot of religious works, but his constant editorializing was frequently pointlessly juvenile in that "I'm 15 and I hate going to church" kind of way. It detracted from his efforts to discuss the literary values of things like Bible episodes or other religious works and came off as a poor imitation of Gibbon's sarcasm in his Decline and Fall. Another minor flaw was that he enjoys when novels under discussion use explicit content so much that it sometimes shades into weirdness. I like sex as much as anyone else and concur with him that the Puritan-esque censorship that so many authorities have practiced throughout history has been actively harmful to art; all the same, his enthusiasm for anything even mildly prurient at times crosses the line between laudable embrace of artistic freedom and odd fetishism (I'm thinking primarily of his effusive praise for books that mention menstruation).
Those quibbles aside, the book is an incredible work of scholarship. The introduction alone should be required reading for anyone tempted to partake in one of those interminable is-it-pretentious-or-is-it-superior debates. It's always useful to be reminded just how vast the literary universe really is, and though Moore only wrote one more entry in this series (volume 2 covers 1600 through 1800, tantalizingly ending right when the novels most people will have heard of begin), the work he does here is as close to essential as can be imagined. Be warned though: your reading list might grow exponentially between the beginning and the end of this magisterial work. Great criticism not only illuminates its subject, it also enlightens the reader, and this is some of the best criticism I've found in a long time.
Moore begins his introduction by defending the concept of "difficult fiction", as distinguished from more mass-market fare. I personally read a decent amount of stuff that would be in the first category and am fine with my marginal place in the broader bibliosphere. I have no interest in either justifying my tastes to YA readers, or, in the other direction, engaging in semantic quibbling with other niche readers about what "really" qualifies as high-end reading. Literature, like everything else, exists on a continuum, and so everyone will have their own definition of what's "difficult", and will also find their tastes shifting around on that spectrum from time to time. Many readers and even writers have an issue with those upmarket books, however, and Moore collects some fairly dim criticism from a few of our esteemed contemporary critics and authors like BR Myers, Dale Peck, and Jonathan Franzen complaining that authors of big experimental novels are being pretentious, alienating themselves from readers, engaging in obscurantism for its own sake, and so on.
Moore rightly points out that those criticisms are usually silly and typically motivated by either ignorance, a chip on the shoulder, or in the case of novelists like Franzen, perhaps professional jealousy. The flashy techniques and unconventional stylings of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Pale Fire, The Recognitions, etc. that can frustrate some readers aren't there specifically to intimidate anyone, they're there because the authors wanted to do something cool for those who would appreciate that sort of thing. Moore relates an amusing story of one of his students who exhibited that same skeptical spirit:
"I once taught Nabokov's story 'The Vane Sisters' to some undergraduates, and when I showed on the chalkboard how the initial letters of the words in the final paragraph of the story form an acrostic spelling out a message, a female student exploded with rage, as though a dirty trick had been performed on her. (I reacted with amazed delight when I first learned of Nabokov's gambit; imagine how difficult it must have been to compose that paragraph, even working in the word "acrostics" into his acrostic!)"
That student's reaction is, at its heart, identical to the sentiments of all these writers who just can't stand the thought of people producing art that not everyone will enjoy or appreciate. Perhaps it's better, from one perspective, to be a Dickens than a Joyce, but there's room enough on the bookshelf for both of them. While there are of course snobbier readers with the mirror-image disdain for anything mass market or too popular, not only are those people far fewer in number, but even the most devoted literary aesthete started off his career reading popular stuff, whereas very few anti-snobs even give the more challenging stuff a chance, perhaps due to lingering unpleasant school memories of being forced to dissect books like dead cats. The ultimate lesson is simple and obvious: if you don't like something, then don't read it, and don't waste your life pathetically writing tons of words about those who do.
Having dispatched those dullards, Moore devotes the main text to illuminating the surprising variety and innovation of novelists from most of the regions of the world. It's organized like so:
Chapter 1 is The Ancient Novel, covering Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian novels.
Chapter 2 is The Medieval Novel, covering Irish, Icelandic, Byzantine, Jewish, and Arthurian novels.
Chapter 3 is The Renaissance Novel, covering Italian, Spanish, French, and English novels.
The Interlude is The Mesoamerican Novel, which is a sadly brief chapter due to the unconscionable destruction of almost all indigenous literary works following European conquest.
Chapter 4 is The Eastern Novel, covering Indian, Tibetan, Arabic, and Persian novels.
Chapter 5 is The Far Eastern Novel, covering Japanese and Chinese novels.
In an occasionally repetitive but never boring fashion, Moore reviews the plots and stylistic innovations of a dizzying number of books, the vast majority of which I'd never heard of. The extensive space given to plot summaries seems to have struck some reviewers as unnecessary; I found them not only useful but crucial, given the difficulty of drawing connections between centuries of world literature without making it clear which elements subsequent generations found important. Without his explanation of what was important in The Book of Genji, for example, Japanese literature would be nearly unintelligible, and his discussion of its feminist legacy was fascinating. Even more familiar literary histories get dazzlingly detailed investigations; his discussion of the links between the Arthurian mythos and the Tristan and Isolde story is a marvel of scholarship and insight, to say nothing of his explication of the origins of the famous Thousand and One Nights, so vital not only to Arabic fiction but also our own. I'm going to need a wheelbarrow to cart all the Chinese novels he mentions away from the library.
There are only two minor weaknesses of the book. One is that Moore is anti-religious to the point of obnoxiousness. I'm an atheist, so I agree with him about the cloying sanctimony of a lot of religious works, but his constant editorializing was frequently pointlessly juvenile in that "I'm 15 and I hate going to church" kind of way. It detracted from his efforts to discuss the literary values of things like Bible episodes or other religious works and came off as a poor imitation of Gibbon's sarcasm in his Decline and Fall. Another minor flaw was that he enjoys when novels under discussion use explicit content so much that it sometimes shades into weirdness. I like sex as much as anyone else and concur with him that the Puritan-esque censorship that so many authorities have practiced throughout history has been actively harmful to art; all the same, his enthusiasm for anything even mildly prurient at times crosses the line between laudable embrace of artistic freedom and odd fetishism (I'm thinking primarily of his effusive praise for books that mention menstruation).
Those quibbles aside, the book is an incredible work of scholarship. The introduction alone should be required reading for anyone tempted to partake in one of those interminable is-it-pretentious-or-is-it-superior debates. It's always useful to be reminded just how vast the literary universe really is, and though Moore only wrote one more entry in this series (volume 2 covers 1600 through 1800, tantalizingly ending right when the novels most people will have heard of begin), the work he does here is as close to essential as can be imagined. Be warned though: your reading list might grow exponentially between the beginning and the end of this magisterial work. Great criticism not only illuminates its subject, it also enlightens the reader, and this is some of the best criticism I've found in a long time.
May 25, 2018
My research interests have been turning increasingly toward a deeper understanding of the theory of the novel, and it is for this reason that I added Steven Moore's recent book to my library. Unfortunately, though, it is an unmitigated disaster, a work that should not be taken seriously by anyone.
Let's begin with Moore's central thesis. He argues that the scholarly consensus, which places the rise of the novel genre at around the beginning of the eighteenth century, is completely wrong, that novels have in fact existed for centuries before that time. Such a hypothesis is provocative, but there's one immediate problem that Moore largely circumvents: it's an argument that's already been made, more than a decade earlier and much more convincingly, by Margaret Anne Doody in The True Story of the Novel. While Moore does make a passing reference to Doody in his book, another curious thing that is missing from his analysis is any recognition of the actual scholars who have written about the history of the novel. Astoundingly, Moore makes no allusion at all to groundbreaking works like Ian Watt's The Rise Of The Novel or Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, books that have set the standard in this field and, even though they tell a narrative that differs from Moore's, surely require him at least to address why these famous scholarly precursors are wrong. After all, it is they who created this "myth" about the novel's invention in the eighteenth century.
Instead, Moore decides to take B.R. Myers, Dale Peck, and Jonathan Franzen as his extremely dubious representative sample of contemporary views on the novel. All three of these figures (Myers and Peck are literary critics, Franzen is a novelist) made famous statements rejecting "difficult" and "experimental" prose, and by amalgamating these views Moore creates his straw man, whom he dubs "MPF" after the initials of Myers, Peck, and Franzen. Never mind that these three figures are debating matters of style rather than what Nancy Armstrong calls "the ideological core" of the novel, never mind that their comments are not meant to relate to the entire history of the genre - for Moore, they suffice to create an illusion of opposition that he can exploit and rail against for the next 700 pages.
Moore's slipshod approach to the scholarship that precedes him is matched by his turgid writing style. It's certainly impressive that he has read such an enormous array of texts, but his in-your-face approach to the reader, while occasionally entertaining, mostly comes across as immature, didactic, and out-of-touch. He compares Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book, for instance, to "a modern teenage girl's MyFace profile." Mostly, though, Moore is just plain condescending, insisting that either you agree with him or you're a blind fool. It's an arrogance that pervades everything from his unnecessarily didactic statements about the "stupidity" of religion to the bizarre multiple-choice personality test he gives in the introduction that again, essentially says that you must either agree with him or you're an idiot.
While I certainly would encourage people to go and read the various texts that Moore talks about in this book for their own sake, he never really addresses why almost *any* of the long prose pieces he writes about should be called a novel. The definition of the genre, from this perspective, becomes so wide and nebulous that it is rendered utterly useless. If I may make a parallel: those who study economics call our current system "capitalism" because it exhibits certain distinguishing features. If someone came along and claimed that ancient Rome, or medieval Japan, were "capitalist" on the sole basis that both these earlier societies used money, their analysis would be seen as weak, if not laughable. In the same way, theorists of the novel have separated it from earlier long prose forms precisely because they see a qualitative shift that requires the identification of a whole new genre. For Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, it is the increasing complexity of voice compared to the earlier, monological form of the epic, whereas for Ian Watt, the rise of the novel is made possible by the rise of empirical philosophy, which created a whole new way of thinking about both reality and the self. But such particularities do not concern Moore, whose categories are so broad they include any text without regard for its particular historical circumstances.
Moore presents this work as an "alternative" history of the novel, but as a reader, I found myself constantly comparing it to the rants of the various conspiracy theorists that I have encountered in the course of my life. Such people exhibit a common trait: they are often obsessively well-read on certain particulars that support their case, as Moore does with regard to the literary texts he talks about, but always at the expense of addressing seriously those authors and facts that could prove them wrong. Moore's refusal to engage with the most famous theorists in the field, his meaningless definition of what a novel is, and his sheer arrogance in addressing the reader all add up to a dire failure as a book.
Let's begin with Moore's central thesis. He argues that the scholarly consensus, which places the rise of the novel genre at around the beginning of the eighteenth century, is completely wrong, that novels have in fact existed for centuries before that time. Such a hypothesis is provocative, but there's one immediate problem that Moore largely circumvents: it's an argument that's already been made, more than a decade earlier and much more convincingly, by Margaret Anne Doody in The True Story of the Novel. While Moore does make a passing reference to Doody in his book, another curious thing that is missing from his analysis is any recognition of the actual scholars who have written about the history of the novel. Astoundingly, Moore makes no allusion at all to groundbreaking works like Ian Watt's The Rise Of The Novel or Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, books that have set the standard in this field and, even though they tell a narrative that differs from Moore's, surely require him at least to address why these famous scholarly precursors are wrong. After all, it is they who created this "myth" about the novel's invention in the eighteenth century.
Instead, Moore decides to take B.R. Myers, Dale Peck, and Jonathan Franzen as his extremely dubious representative sample of contemporary views on the novel. All three of these figures (Myers and Peck are literary critics, Franzen is a novelist) made famous statements rejecting "difficult" and "experimental" prose, and by amalgamating these views Moore creates his straw man, whom he dubs "MPF" after the initials of Myers, Peck, and Franzen. Never mind that these three figures are debating matters of style rather than what Nancy Armstrong calls "the ideological core" of the novel, never mind that their comments are not meant to relate to the entire history of the genre - for Moore, they suffice to create an illusion of opposition that he can exploit and rail against for the next 700 pages.
Moore's slipshod approach to the scholarship that precedes him is matched by his turgid writing style. It's certainly impressive that he has read such an enormous array of texts, but his in-your-face approach to the reader, while occasionally entertaining, mostly comes across as immature, didactic, and out-of-touch. He compares Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book, for instance, to "a modern teenage girl's MyFace profile." Mostly, though, Moore is just plain condescending, insisting that either you agree with him or you're a blind fool. It's an arrogance that pervades everything from his unnecessarily didactic statements about the "stupidity" of religion to the bizarre multiple-choice personality test he gives in the introduction that again, essentially says that you must either agree with him or you're an idiot.
While I certainly would encourage people to go and read the various texts that Moore talks about in this book for their own sake, he never really addresses why almost *any* of the long prose pieces he writes about should be called a novel. The definition of the genre, from this perspective, becomes so wide and nebulous that it is rendered utterly useless. If I may make a parallel: those who study economics call our current system "capitalism" because it exhibits certain distinguishing features. If someone came along and claimed that ancient Rome, or medieval Japan, were "capitalist" on the sole basis that both these earlier societies used money, their analysis would be seen as weak, if not laughable. In the same way, theorists of the novel have separated it from earlier long prose forms precisely because they see a qualitative shift that requires the identification of a whole new genre. For Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, it is the increasing complexity of voice compared to the earlier, monological form of the epic, whereas for Ian Watt, the rise of the novel is made possible by the rise of empirical philosophy, which created a whole new way of thinking about both reality and the self. But such particularities do not concern Moore, whose categories are so broad they include any text without regard for its particular historical circumstances.
Moore presents this work as an "alternative" history of the novel, but as a reader, I found myself constantly comparing it to the rants of the various conspiracy theorists that I have encountered in the course of my life. Such people exhibit a common trait: they are often obsessively well-read on certain particulars that support their case, as Moore does with regard to the literary texts he talks about, but always at the expense of addressing seriously those authors and facts that could prove them wrong. Moore's refusal to engage with the most famous theorists in the field, his meaningless definition of what a novel is, and his sheer arrogance in addressing the reader all add up to a dire failure as a book.
November 10, 2012
Moore seems concerned to widen the appeal of the novel and to encourage people to read more of them. No problems with that idea. This nearly 700 page tome is only the first part of Moore's strategy, covering the period from the 20th-c BCE to the 17th-c CE, well before the 'traditional' Western concept, which argues that the novel began in the 18th-c CE. In a 36 page Introduction, Moore spells out his stance, arguing that the 'novel' really began ca. 4th-c BCE (and as a consequence, there is nothing 'new' about the novel — it's all been written about before), and generally expresses his disdain at those who belittle 'difficult' novels. Moore would rather encourage people to read all novels, including those deemed 'difficult' — apparently simply for the sake of their difficulty — a kind of Ars Gratia Artis approach.
It is this approach I am sure that will cause the most disagreements among traditionalists. One could start with what Moore means exactly by the word 'difficult'; it appears he means 'English' texts which promote modernist and post-modernist ideas in their writing, something traditionalists might more correctly classify as 'experimental novels'. On the other hand, 'difficult' novels can embrace lots of other types: many would find 18th-c CE novels 'difficult' because of the the way they are written, or because the themes might be abstruse and/or unfamiliar, or too elaborate, too long, too academic, etc. etc. Most of the texts referred to in this tome would be difficult simply because they are not even written in English, and one would need to have to rely on translations (assuming they exist) of the works — itself a contentious area, as some translations are considered 'bad', or 'stodgy' or 'too academic', etc. or are so obscure or scholarly that they are not even readily available to the ordinary reader. This problem remains.
Moore courageously ploughs on, however, and the 'best' part of this book is the general enthusiasm he transmits regarding his extensive reading, and which he introduces to the reader in his rather jaunty, slightly irreverential style, peppered with anachronistic, macho, and sometimes even flippant authorial comments and asides that initially, at least, provide for an enjoyable read for the modern reader. I suspect that this approach comes from a series of lectures on the subject, whereby such asides would be much appreciated by an audience. In my case, since I read the book from go to whoa, this technique eventually became for me more of a source of irritation (unfair, perhaps, but… ) so that by the time I had reached page 585 I could not help note my irritation. On this page alone, which happens to be in the 'Japanese Fiction' section, I noted: "…he lights out for the wilds…"; "… the Heike and Genji butted topknots a few years later…"; "written in a style MSG'd with Chinese vocabulary…"; and, "… in Wilson's translation… [his] dialogue is a bit stilted, sounding at times like a poorly dubbed martial arts movie…".
That being said, where else would you get a popular, readable introduction to all these 'forgotten' works? Moore provide us with six sections. First, the Ancient Novel (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Christian — 90 pages). Second, the Mediaeval Novel (Irish, Icelandic, Byzantine, Jewish, Arthurian — 122 pages). Third, the Renaissance Novel (Italian, Spanish, French, English — 142 pages). Then we have a special Bridge section, to cover the Mesoamerican Novel — 8 pages. Fourth, the Eastern Novel (Indian, Tibetan, Arabic, Persian — 129 pages). Fifth, the Far Eastern Novel (Japanese, Chinese — 125 pages). Even so, there are a couple of problems connected with the size of Moore's task: first, although the sections are understandable as such, they do, of course, overlap, and the reader interested in a truer chronological presentation must needs refer to the Chronological Index at the end of the book for that; second, Moore himself early on apologises for needing to limit himself in general to providing the plot-lines only of the many texts he discusses — understandable, to a certain degree; but since there are only a very limited number of plots one can have, eventually this tends to become ineffective. Both these problems tend to militate against the avowed intention of providing an 'alternative' history, as most of the work for this seems to be left in the lap of the reader to follow up, if required…
So, I have mixed feelings about this work. Perhaps Moore will solve some of these problems in his final tome. For me, this one is like the proverbial Parson's Egg — good in parts.
It is this approach I am sure that will cause the most disagreements among traditionalists. One could start with what Moore means exactly by the word 'difficult'; it appears he means 'English' texts which promote modernist and post-modernist ideas in their writing, something traditionalists might more correctly classify as 'experimental novels'. On the other hand, 'difficult' novels can embrace lots of other types: many would find 18th-c CE novels 'difficult' because of the the way they are written, or because the themes might be abstruse and/or unfamiliar, or too elaborate, too long, too academic, etc. etc. Most of the texts referred to in this tome would be difficult simply because they are not even written in English, and one would need to have to rely on translations (assuming they exist) of the works — itself a contentious area, as some translations are considered 'bad', or 'stodgy' or 'too academic', etc. or are so obscure or scholarly that they are not even readily available to the ordinary reader. This problem remains.
Moore courageously ploughs on, however, and the 'best' part of this book is the general enthusiasm he transmits regarding his extensive reading, and which he introduces to the reader in his rather jaunty, slightly irreverential style, peppered with anachronistic, macho, and sometimes even flippant authorial comments and asides that initially, at least, provide for an enjoyable read for the modern reader. I suspect that this approach comes from a series of lectures on the subject, whereby such asides would be much appreciated by an audience. In my case, since I read the book from go to whoa, this technique eventually became for me more of a source of irritation (unfair, perhaps, but… ) so that by the time I had reached page 585 I could not help note my irritation. On this page alone, which happens to be in the 'Japanese Fiction' section, I noted: "…he lights out for the wilds…"; "… the Heike and Genji butted topknots a few years later…"; "written in a style MSG'd with Chinese vocabulary…"; and, "… in Wilson's translation… [his] dialogue is a bit stilted, sounding at times like a poorly dubbed martial arts movie…".
That being said, where else would you get a popular, readable introduction to all these 'forgotten' works? Moore provide us with six sections. First, the Ancient Novel (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Christian — 90 pages). Second, the Mediaeval Novel (Irish, Icelandic, Byzantine, Jewish, Arthurian — 122 pages). Third, the Renaissance Novel (Italian, Spanish, French, English — 142 pages). Then we have a special Bridge section, to cover the Mesoamerican Novel — 8 pages. Fourth, the Eastern Novel (Indian, Tibetan, Arabic, Persian — 129 pages). Fifth, the Far Eastern Novel (Japanese, Chinese — 125 pages). Even so, there are a couple of problems connected with the size of Moore's task: first, although the sections are understandable as such, they do, of course, overlap, and the reader interested in a truer chronological presentation must needs refer to the Chronological Index at the end of the book for that; second, Moore himself early on apologises for needing to limit himself in general to providing the plot-lines only of the many texts he discusses — understandable, to a certain degree; but since there are only a very limited number of plots one can have, eventually this tends to become ineffective. Both these problems tend to militate against the avowed intention of providing an 'alternative' history, as most of the work for this seems to be left in the lap of the reader to follow up, if required…
So, I have mixed feelings about this work. Perhaps Moore will solve some of these problems in his final tome. For me, this one is like the proverbial Parson's Egg — good in parts.
October 4, 2010
This book worked up a great appetite in me for all things non-linear. There are so many incredible things people have written that I have never heard of before this! A vast, polemical, gobsmacking menu. A few highlights I marked out (I starred the ones I've never heard of before this book):
Don Quixote
Plum in the Golden Vase
The Tale of Genji
Journey to the West
Decameron
Tanakh
David Story (Bible)
Gargantua and Panagruel
The Golden Ass
*The Sound of the Kiss
*Haft Paykar
Three Kingdoms
Water Margin
*Kadambari
Tale of the Heike
*Tirant lo Blanc
Arthurian Romances of Chretien de Troyes
*Hypnertomachia Poliphili
Satyricon
Njal’s Saga
Arabian Nights
*Tower of Myriad Mirrors
Gilgamesh
An Ethiopian Story
Popol Vuh
*Amir Hamza
*Layla and Majnun
*What Ten Young Men Did
*Aretino’s Dialogues
*Vis and Ramin
*Adventures of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan
Don Quixote
Plum in the Golden Vase
The Tale of Genji
Journey to the West
Decameron
Tanakh
David Story (Bible)
Gargantua and Panagruel
The Golden Ass
*The Sound of the Kiss
*Haft Paykar
Three Kingdoms
Water Margin
*Kadambari
Tale of the Heike
*Tirant lo Blanc
Arthurian Romances of Chretien de Troyes
*Hypnertomachia Poliphili
Satyricon
Njal’s Saga
Arabian Nights
*Tower of Myriad Mirrors
Gilgamesh
An Ethiopian Story
Popol Vuh
*Amir Hamza
*Layla and Majnun
*What Ten Young Men Did
*Aretino’s Dialogues
*Vis and Ramin
*Adventures of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan
November 19, 2019
Was it interesting? Mostly. Did I learn things? Yes.
Other reviewers have discussed Moore's thesis and his prose so I will not. (I learned things from them too, though!) Truthfully, what drove me batty about this book is that it's just mean.
Unnecessarily cruel towards people who enjoy more traditional, straightforward literature (or even, God forbid, popular literature).
Unnecessarily cruel towards anyone who has ever been a member of any religion -- with extra spite, it seems, for particular faith traditions.
Positions itself as the authority on whether a particular text is "really" misogynistic. Apparently blind to its own misogynistic tropes.
There may have been more. My eyes glazed over.
Did I learn things? Yes. But I won't be reading volume 2.
Other reviewers have discussed Moore's thesis and his prose so I will not. (I learned things from them too, though!) Truthfully, what drove me batty about this book is that it's just mean.
Unnecessarily cruel towards people who enjoy more traditional, straightforward literature (or even, God forbid, popular literature).
Unnecessarily cruel towards anyone who has ever been a member of any religion -- with extra spite, it seems, for particular faith traditions.
Positions itself as the authority on whether a particular text is "really" misogynistic. Apparently blind to its own misogynistic tropes.
There may have been more. My eyes glazed over.
Did I learn things? Yes. But I won't be reading volume 2.
February 15, 2024
frankly terrible book. of worth solely for the massive bibliography at the back - skip to that and avoid moore's gaping void of a prose style, like if a cracked.com article took the form of a gaddis scholar who loves to gawk at women. genuinely unbearable for huge swathes - also i know this came out in 2010 but there's a random slur drop around pg 570 (discussion of the japanese novel the changelings) that surely would have been unconscionable then, and is very hard to stomach now. avoid!!! avoid!!! avoid!!!
May 10, 2015
An entertaining and enlightening book weakened on one hand by Moore's insistence on recounting plots in detail (as other reviewers have noted), especially when in certain periods the plots to many works are highly similar (there's only so many times we need to be told the plot of a book about king Arthur (it's once)) and on the other hand by Moore's sometimes basically disgusting personal insertions, scattered with a level of veiled misogyny despite his frequent attempts at feminism and two transphobic slurs (to his credit used in the context of books about trans characters he does his misguided best to uplift as proof gender has always been beyond the western binary). His constant attacks on religion also grate pretty quickly but at least he lobs them at every faith without discrimination.
Despite these flaws it's a passionate and interesting history, one that unearths many books I would almost certainly have never heard of otherwise, and providing a good guide to the best translations and critical readings for books I have. The introduction (a wonderfully angry 35-odd page manifesto in defence of literary experimentation) and bibliography/chronological list at the back are practically worth the price of entry alone. I'm looking forward to getting to volume two but it doesn't look like a paperback is happening for that.
Despite these flaws it's a passionate and interesting history, one that unearths many books I would almost certainly have never heard of otherwise, and providing a good guide to the best translations and critical readings for books I have. The introduction (a wonderfully angry 35-odd page manifesto in defence of literary experimentation) and bibliography/chronological list at the back are practically worth the price of entry alone. I'm looking forward to getting to volume two but it doesn't look like a paperback is happening for that.
December 17, 2016
A better name for this would be Sex Scenes: Beginnings to 1600. The vast majority of his examples focused on sex, the kinkier the better he seems to like it. And if you don't agree it's because those stuffy Christians/Victorians have turned you into a prude. He gets increasingly creepy, to the point of arguing that we should be fine with 13 year olds having sex, making me see why his bio talks about his inability to land a teaching job. A book exploring sex in fiction might have been interesting, but here it was frustrating because that's not what this is supposed to be.
On the rare occasions when he's not focused on sex, he compares everything to Joyce and Gaddis (he's the leading expert on Gaddis and will tell you this about 50 times) and if it's not experimental then obviously it sucks.
Random interesting fact - Eric Clapton wrote the song Layla because of a 12th century Persian novel.
I am going to keep this (and fortunately only spent $1 on it at a library book sale) for the appendix at the back with a great list of works. I read the collection Ancient Greek Novels because of this book, which makes the experience worth it. It's a good reference book to have on hand but not if you spent $30 on it.
On the rare occasions when he's not focused on sex, he compares everything to Joyce and Gaddis (he's the leading expert on Gaddis and will tell you this about 50 times) and if it's not experimental then obviously it sucks.
Random interesting fact - Eric Clapton wrote the song Layla because of a 12th century Persian novel.
I am going to keep this (and fortunately only spent $1 on it at a library book sale) for the appendix at the back with a great list of works. I read the collection Ancient Greek Novels because of this book, which makes the experience worth it. It's a good reference book to have on hand but not if you spent $30 on it.
November 23, 2013
Any major criticism of this book begins with how much of it is plot summary. While there is certainly more than I would like at times, I find it difficult to imagine a different way to go about this type of literary history, and the advantage is that the reader can figure out which books he would like to further pursue. I found--much to my wife's dismay--so many new and interesting "novels" that I now want to read. Couple that with Moore's warm, funny, and knowledgable voice, and this book is definitely worth reading. I can't wait to pick up its sequel.
August 25, 2011
This is one of those books that affirmed a lot of what I thought about literature but never really saw documented anywhere outside of scholarly articles. The book is a massive undertaking on how the main ideas of the novel have been part of literature for a long time. There are several trains of thought and conclusions to be drawn from Moore's research, but it's one of those books worth reading for all literary scholars.
Read
December 30, 2011This book is a glorious achievement. Steven Moore will make you want to read every ancient text he discusses. The novel has always been a challenging, rebellious, delightful, ever-changing form, and Moore reminds us of this, partly as an attempt to quell the current wave of negative criticism that wants to take the fun and the challenge out of the form.
Want to read
July 18, 2013This looks interesting, and might be a good resource if I get into going back and reading some more obscure classics. Note, though, that one reviewer points out some super wack Asian jokes popping up: "written in a style MSG'd with Chinese vocabulary," he apparently says at one point. Jeez, dude.
November 12, 2015
Really liked it ! An eye opener. Different perspective on the Novel through the ages.
Steven Moore's approach deepens and broadens our view on literature.
I have to add another pile of books to my to-read list, titles that were unknown to me, books that I now wish to read, and read, and read...
Steven Moore's approach deepens and broadens our view on literature.
I have to add another pile of books to my to-read list, titles that were unknown to me, books that I now wish to read, and read, and read...
Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews