Generic Coordinates

The Evolution of European literary prose fiction out of classical and vernacular epic poetry and romances which privilege imagination has become a familiar story. Ian Watt and other scholars begin with Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, first translation into English 1612). It is the tale of a picaro who is plunged into a melancholy state by reading fiction. His cure entails setting out on a journey — accompanied by his steady companion — and engaging sober philosophical questions about the nature of reality, not least his own. Cervantes, a voracious reader, created a Menippean dialogical text full of incongruities and self-reflexive ironies, which was purportedly a factual tale written in Arabic and discovered in a Spanish marketplace. Jorge Luis Borges appropriated it in his postmodern fashion. Bakhtin reminds us that history shows that fiction lends itself to the carnivalesque or the ludic. In one sense at least it is intrinsically ludic. The distinctions between art and nature, artifice and the real, as well as imagination and historical fact, have become less distinct in various individual practices, even as they underpin Cervantes's own text and the history of the European novel. In our own period the rise of fiction which draws in very explicit ways on historical events or persons has caused not a little debate about the distinction between historical and fictional discourses.

After Cervantes, the novel continued to evolve, reaching a narrative apogee in the realist novels of the nineteenth century. It changed again as language was increasingly foregrounded, as one kind of fiction evolved even more into metafiction of the kind Sterne had practiced in Tristram Shandy, and as visual culture became a dominant medium for imaginative and reflective self-expression.