Rise of the Novel: Exploring History's Greatest Works

by Leo Damrosch

Thousands of novels are published around the world every year. There are so many readily available, it would take multiple lifetimes for a single person to even read a fraction of them. But it hasn’t always been that way.

While humans have always been storytellers, the novel as we recognize it today is a relatively new art form in the timeline of human culture. Of all the ways we tell stories, why has the novel become such a perennial favorite? How did the novel go from a narrative experiment with a low-brow reputation to a cultural touchstone and focal point of modern literature?

In the 24 lectures of Rise of the Novel, you will take a journey from the birth of the novel to the height of the form in the mid-19th century - and better understand what this literary form can tell us about human nature and our unquenchable thirst for great stories. With Professor Emeritus Leo Damrosch of Harvard University as your guide, you will dive into some of the most notable works that helped create and shape the novel over the course of more than three centuries, looking at the social and historical influences that coincided with shifts in literary taste along the way.

Beginning with Don Quixote - held up by many scholars as the foundational text from which the novel form would spring - Professor Damrosch will lead you through works both tragic and comic, brief and diffuse, epic and domestic. From early works like La Princesse de Clèves and Robinson Crusoe to pinnacles of the form in the 19th century such as Emma and Middlemarch - along with a few novels that are less familiar today but well worth knowing - you will dive into works with different perspectives and intentions that have all impacted our culture in their own way.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Audiobook, Books About Books, Literature, 21st Century

Audible Audio

First published April 24, 2020

About the author

Leo Damrosch is an American author and professor. In 2001, he was named the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University.[1] He received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His areas of academic specialty include Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and Puritanism.[1] Damrosch's "The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus" is one of the most important recent explorations of the early history of the Society of Friends. His Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (2005) was a National Book Award finalist for nonfiction and winner of the 2006 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for best work of nonfiction. Among his other books are "Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth" (1980), "God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding" (1985), "Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson" (1987), and "Tocqueville's Discovery of America" (2010).

Reviews

[Dennis Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rise of the Novel: Exploring History's Greatest Works by Leo Damrosch is a considerably more intimate and narrowly defined examination of the novel as literature than I at first suspected. The first novel this course truly considers is Don Quixote and the last is Middlemarch. You might think that it would engage more earlier with the play traditions, or that it would stretch later after Middlemarch. The confinement of the course's study to that slender selection is actually to this course's benefit, as it enables Damrosch to engage with a broad sampling of temporally bound literature so that we can trace some innovations across the volumes. Indeed, some of the authors are familiar with each other and cite one another, giving the study a hint of self-referential virtue. Damrosch as a lecturer is clear and charismatic. There's a sense that he truly loves his subject, and one might find an almost conspiratorial air of sharing a secret when Damrosch talks about some of the novels in the series. It makes the whole thing worthwhile and commendable.

[Gilbert Stack · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the Great Courses, but this particular set of lectures didn’t work for me. It focuses on 24 books that show different aspects of the growth of the form of the novel. I hadn’t read most of the books, but even for those I had read, I had difficulty getting more than halfway through each lecture. Generally, I felt that Damrosch made his point in the first few minutes of each and the rest of the detail just didn’t interest me.

If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leo Damrosch takes an expansive view of literary history and endeavors to highlight great strides forward in modern narrative style in this series of lectures. He starts with the early efforts to break away from the Poetry-dominated Romantic epics, through the picaresque style and pseudo-historical novels, into what we would consider to be modern novel styles. I had read none of the earliest works, though I had heard of several of them referenced in my favorite 17th and 18th century novels, such as The Golden Ass. The older style was capped by Don Quixote, a book which I have still not read in its entirety as I hope to one day read it in its original Spanish. Springing off of that landmark title came a century of stories with stronger themes and more deliberate commentary on society but still with a picaresque element to them. These led into modern novel styles with omniscient third person narrators, and here Damrosch gives a lot of precedence to French novels. Were all of these novels featuring French aristocracy having affairs really innovating on the form of the novel itself? However, I can’t complain too much as he dedicates two of his lectures to my favorite author, Jane Austen, and he pointed me in the direction of one of my new favorites, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Interestingly, he caps his lectures by naming his personal pick for “greatest English novel,” and it was Middlemarch, a book I had not sought out much because I had heard it was incredibly long and boring. However, Damrosch’s recommendation for other novels turned out well, and that original warning came from college freshmen already overwhelmed with their reading load, so perhaps I should reevaluate my prejudice and try out the novel for myself. This series of lectures was very interesting for readers with some grounding in the classics. It gives a wonderfully broad overview of the world history of the novel, even if Damrosch is a little biased towards French literature, and is a great way to expand your classic TBR list to bursting point.

[Cloak88 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The early rise of the novel....

This series of lectures chronicles the early historie of the novel. It focussen on twenty-four significant novels from those times and discusses their author, plot, structure, and narrative devices that made it unique. Though interesting as a concept, it turns out that just discussing a bunch of books (mostly form France, Engeland and Germany) isn't that captivating. As the lecturer himself mentions at the beginning: the literary canon and the study thereof is rather insular, not that useful and hard to understand for outsiders... And unfortunately this lectures falls partly into this same trap. Tough the individual novels can be interesting, without knowing their influence or significance outside of their scholarly niche their impact falls flat. On the upside the lecturers himself was pretty good and those few novels that did draw my attention were indeed interesting.

Overall though this isn't the best Great Courses lectures series out there. Unless this is just your area of interest, I'd suggest skipping this series and focussen on one of their other series.

[Rolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had already read at least portions of many of these books--Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Frankenstein. Others I have seen adaptations of, like Dangerous Liaisons and Tom Jones. All these and others all get their own lessons summarizing their plots and their lessons here.

The real contribution in my mind is the larger discussion of how each of these is situated historically in the history of the novel, what they were trying to do in the context of what a “novel” even meant to their authors and contexts, how they were building on and responding to each other (for instance, it had never occurred to me that Gulliver’s Travels was written as a response to and light satire of Robinson Crusoe), and how that differs from (and grew into) our sense of the “novel” today.

[Chris Leuchtenburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Great Courses, but I didn't love this one. It is articulate, concise and informative as with other courses, but instead of discussing the novel as an art form, it is restricted to an examination of a select number of "great" novels. The author spent too much time recounting the plots of these selected novels and very little discussing the influence of the books or any other books written at that time.

I wouldn't dare challenge the author's choices of great books, but neither did I come away wanting to read any of the ones that I hadn't yet read, with the possible exception of Tom Jones.

[Tom Axworthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning with Cervantes and ending with George Eliot, Leo Damrosch gives his usual superlative performance in 24 lectures on the rise of the novel. Only 30 minutes each, Damrosch manages to give the most salient facts about the author's career in his lectures, while bringing out the themes of the classic works he reviews.This is a great introduction to a host of important novels and I will now read the books that Damrosch has put on his list of the greatest works.

[Peter Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Professor Damrosch’s courses. I have listen to a couple of others. As part of my Audible membership I can download some of the Great Courses selections. I wanted to take a break from Ancient Rome so first I listened to a P. G. Wodehouse novel and then I went on to Rise of the Novel. I have read about half of the novels he discusses. After spending so much time with historians it was nice to listen to a literary scholar.

[Michael Patton · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a few years now, I've been reading mostly for information. But these lectures have reignited my interest in the great novels. I now realize I've missed a few of the giants. To be honest, I was unfamiliar with Diderot and didn't realize Rousseau had ever written a novel. It was also interesting to hear what Dr. Damrosch says about the authors and books I do know.

[Sonstepaul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought I’d enjoy this more but it’s fundamental thesis that everything important in the development of the novel was over by 1870 is completely wrong. Many of the novels discussed here are hugely important—Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein—but the time spent on pre-20th century is overmuch.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview but seriously Harvard is just a brand. Read all the professors.

[Zulfiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some insights were interesting, some are good to be reminded of, and some of the subject matter was chewing over the ground meat that has already lost its taste.

[Brenden Gallagher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got a lot out of this look at earth development of the novel and how it shaped literary history.

[Ulee ☄︎]

Review pending ....

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5*