The Encyclopedia of the Novel is an advanced desktop reference source on the novel as a literary genre. International in scope, its articles focus on the history, terminology, and concepts essential to studying the genre. While available to the beginner, the Encyclopedia is aimed at a wider, more experienced audience. Its goal is to assist specialists, graduate students, and teachers who are working in fields ancillary to their areas of expertise, and also to help the interested general reader looking for detailed, reliable information. As the first reference source entirely devoted to the global history, theory, form of the novel, the Encyclopedia offers extensive coverage of advanced concepts in those areas.
Given that no consensus exists on what constitutes a “novel,” the editors had to consider the scope of this project carefully. Novels, we thought, ought to be in prose, and yet we have important novels that use verse (Jean Toomer) and others written entirely in verse (Elizabeth Barrett Browning). Novels should at least have a narrative, and yet we have novels without narrative (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras). We also have novels without characters (Samuel Beckett), novels that are not fiction (Truman Capote), and countless novels that include one or all of these elements at some point within them. Today, the closest scholars come to a consensus is perhaps the broad agreement on the explanatory power of Mikhail Bakhtin's claim that the novel is not, in fact, a genre but is rather an anti-genre, a form of writing that parodies any literary form that stands still long enough to be identifiable.
And these are only the problems that arise within a restricted definition of the novel as a product of Western modernity. Recognizable novels elsewhere predate the eighteenth-century, the traditional starting point for discussions of the modern novel, including the Chinese Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), from 1552. Much older fictional or semi-fictional narrative forms long predate modernity: Petronius's Satyricon and Chariton's Callirhoe, both from the first century CE, along with China's Shih-chi (ca. 85 BCE, Historical Records) and South Asia's katha and champu works of the late first and early second millennium. The entries on “Ancient Narratives” discuss all of these, either as novels or in relation to the novel genre.
In its global scope and temporal breadth, this Encyclopedia can serve as a resource for scholars interested in tracing the conjunctions among national traditions and among older and new narrative forms. It can serve as a starting point for mapping kinships and for understanding a particular novelistic traditions, like national canons, as part of a truly global context.
Scholars of novel studies lack a term like poetry for novels, e.g., an all-encompassing, loosely defined generic label that escapes the sense of immediacy imparted by the definite article in the novel. Few would argue that poetry is synonymous with the poem; the former refers to a capacious, abstract category of writing, while the latter references a concrete literary form. However, in critical work on novels, the novel has long performed double duty, serving both of these necessary functions, so much so that its definite article is sometimes placed in quotation marks—“the” novel—to clarify that the writer means a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous concept. This volume takes a capacious approach to its namesake, incorporating the fullest range of writings that scholars call “novels” and giving significant attention to the debate itself.
The editorial team consists of four scholars who work on different geographical traditions of the novel. Peter Melville Logan writes on the British novel, Olakunle George specializes in the African novel, Susan Hegeman the American novel and literary theory, and Efraín Kristal the novel in Latin America. During the course of this project, they all took on new areas of responsibility. Professor Logan oversaw articles on book history and the novel in Britain. Professor George took charge of pieces on Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, as well as those on novel subgenres. Professor Hegeman oversaw entries on North America, Central Europe, and the contributions on theory. Professor Kristal supervised articles on Latin America, Western Europe, and the entries on literary form. Assisting this knowledgeable team was the international consortium of scholars who made up the Advisory Board for the volume, and the editors are profoundly grateful to them for their guidance and generosity.
This Encyclopedia could not have been written without the pioneering work of Paul Schellinger, who produced the invaluable Encyclopedia of the Novel (1999, 2 vols.). That work devoted the majority of its entries to an international roster of individual novels and novelists, and the reader looking for such information is advised to go directly to that source. Because of Professor Schellinger's work, the present volume is able to focus solely on the historical, formal, and theoretical aspects of novels, and the editors are indebted to his work for that opportunity.
The Encyclopedia consists of 145 separate articles written by solicited contributors. With few exceptions, all articles have been peer-reviewed. In the selection of entries, preference has been given to larger synthetic entries on broad topics, with more specific topics considered within that context. Critical information that could not be included in the lengthier pieces is given in short entries. Entries are extensively cross-referenced both within the article and through a list of related entries following each article. Subtopics of longer entries are also referenced as blind entries within the alphabetical flow of the Encyclopedia and within the comprehensive index. Each entry includes a bibliography for further reading.
Entries fall into four conceptual categories. The largest group consists of articles on formal and theoretical aspects of the genre. These discuss elements within novels (such as story, plot, character), stylistic matters (rhetoric, narrative perspective), and major subgenres (Historical Novel, Domestic Novel), with a selective emphasis on those common to several national or regional traditions. Entries on the theory of the novel and its terminology include articles on critical theory, narrative theory, genre theory, and the longstanding debates over histories and definitions of the novel. The goal in these articles is not to serve as a substitute for a comprehensive study of these rich topics but to describe in detail potentially unfamiliar terms and critical premises that scholars of the novel are likely to encounter in their research, and also to supply beginning points for further study.
Historical entries describe novels and novel writing in different areas of the world. Identifying regional labels proved to be a complex task because of differences in how scholars define these geographical fields. The United States, for example, is one of the very few regions of the world that groups novels by ethnicity. Linguistic categories are more common; in the Caribbean and South Asia, different languages produce novels that may identify more with the country of linguistic origin than with the multilingual region of origin. In much of the world, nationality is a dominant rubric in grouping novels and novelists, and that poses problems of its own, both because of the fluidity of nation-states and because of difficulties within the concept of national literatures in general. Rather than inventing a consistent, rational taxonomy bearing little relationship to the world of novel studies today, the editors chose a course of “rigorous inconsistency” by adhering to actual practices in scholarship as much as possible.
The novel has an intimate relationship to the mediating role of print. Entries on the history of the book discuss the materiality of the novel, such as the technology of novels and of their circulation, as these conditions bear on novelistic form and content. The episodic demands of serialization, for example, affected the structure of plot, while market needs often dictated that postcolonial novelists write in the language of the empire. Typography, paper, copyright law—all contributed to shaping the genre, and continue to do so, as in the emergence of the cell-phone novel in Japan.
A small group of entries look at correlate areas that bear on the history of the novel and on the critical study of the genre. Some of these consider the influence of other genres of writing, such as journalism and life writing. Others consider the impact that new technologies, such as photography and book illustration, have had on novels.
In designing the Encyclopedia, the editors took into consideration one of the central contradictions the project entailed. While it is a global reference work, its contributors are by definition well-established specialists in regional or conceptual subfields. This is fine for historical entries, but it can present a dilemma for many other topics. The concept of authorship, for instance, has different histories in different places, and a comprehensive treatment of the topic would be itself a life's work that could easily fill this entire Encyclopedia. Instead, the editors selected experts with a thorough knowledge of the subject in a given place and asked them to consider patterns and problems that might be applicable elsewhere, while at the same time expanding the range of reference beyond any single national context. Thus someone working on a topic such as authorship should find a useful articulation of conceptual issues that have applicability beyond the regional specifics it mentions.
In order to be as generous as possible in referencing other works, a condensed citation style has been adopted throughout. While brief, each citation should provide the minimum information necessary to locate a given book or article. Bibliographies at the end of the article are generally intended as a brief list of further reading for the researcher who needs to know where to begin. Other references are cited parenthetically in the text, as needed, and readers are well advised to consider these as well.