As the story of the novel moves into the modernist decades, it is especially necessary to guard against the progressive fallacy. For although writers constantly create new forms out of the perceived limitations of their predecessors, this does not necessarily imply, as it would in the natural sciences, that the new is an advance. Hence, while the present account focuses on major new directions in the idea and practice of fiction in the twentieth century, every variety of the novel that has been invented continues to be practised and, above all, the omniscient realist narrative, as developed over the two preceding centuries, remains a mainstay of the genre not just numerically but qualitatively.

At the same time, as indicated in the preceding essays, the novel has at all times reflected on the ambiguity of its narrative premises which can be understood both as literary conventions and as extra-literary truth claims. And as the sense of a social whole becomes more problematic, so it matters more to determine what sort of truth the novel tells: historical, moral, poetic? All of the above, no doubt, but which most essentially? Is failure in one of them more damaging than in others? Does poetic power give dangerous conviction to historical falsehood? As such questions especially pressed themselves on European writers at the end of the nineteenth century, the literary imagination was frequently polarised into two contrary possibilities.