This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

Is queerness coeval with American-ness, or with the American version of neoliberalism? The writers explored in this chapter, many of whom have close ties to countries other than the United States, are all preoccupied with these questions. Some, such as Tomasz Jedrowski and Garth Greenwell, implicitly accept queer identity as an American export. Others, including Chinelo Okparanta and Zeyn Joukhadar, fight to carve out small, temporary spaces of resistance to queerness’s entanglements with a certain brand of Western-ness. Others still, such as Shyam Selvadurai and Akwaeke Emezi, create interstitial queer identities that draw on non-Western understandings of selfhood and set them in conversation with mainstream Western queer culture. Focusing on the novel, this chapter engages with writers who identify as gay, lesbian, genderqueer, and trans/ogbanje, hailing from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Germany/Poland, and Syria as well as the United States; while most of them are Anglophone, it also considers some examples of non-Anglophone representations of Western notions of queerness, such as Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile.

Chapter 14 traces the development of Romanticism and positions Goethe within it. It addresses the factors that shaped Romanticism, such as the rise of the prose novel and the revival of interest in folklore, and positions the movement in relation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that – despite his well-known ambivalence about aspects of Romanticism – Goethe contributed to it throughout his life, paving the way for it with his early works, and embodying many of its tendencies later on, above all in Faust.

Chapter 10 examines Goethe’s development as a writer of prose across the spectrum of forms, beginning with his radicalisation of the epistolary novel through his Werther. It highlights significant influences – from Giovanni Boccaccio to Sophie von La Roche – and, at the same time, emphasises the singularity of his writing. It also reflects on Goethe’s use of deliberate aestheticisation as a means of contending with the instability of human life. The chapter shows that Goethe’s prose writing is both thoroughly embedded in and transcends the many contexts from which it emerged.

The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?

The Introduction provides an overview of the book’s argument about how novels in nineteenth-century Britain (by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy) represented modes of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of uncertainty. It also offers a synopsis of key intellectual contexts: (1) the history of probability in logic and mathematics into the Victorian era, the parallel rise of statistics, and the novelistic importance of probability as a dual concept, geared to both the aleatory and the epistemic, to objective frequencies and subjective degrees of belief; (2) the school of thought known as associationism, which was related to mathematical probability and remained influential in the nineteenth century, underwriting the embodied account of mental function and volition in physiological psychology, and representations of deliberation and action in novels; (3) the place of uncertainty in treatises of rhetoric, law, and grammar, where considerations of evidence were inflected by probability’s epistemological transformation; and (4) the resultant shifts in literary probability (and related concepts like mimesis and verisimilitude) from Victorian novel theory to structuralist narratology, where understandings of probability as a dual concept were tacitly incorporated.

This chapter examines the representation of illness and impairment in various works of fiction, poetry, and memoir to demonstrate the creative possibilities of disability. Where literary uses of disability have historically been thought to denote suffering, corruption, social failure, or inspirational and redemptive lessons aimed at non-disabled readers, recent scholarship has explored disability’s generative relation to structures of plot and to poetics as well as its epistemological effects, constituting new forms of knowledge. The chapter spotlights three texts that explicitly challenge tropes of deviance and lack and foreground bodymind anomalousness as the source of creative expression and knowing.

This considers the relationship between the elevation of the novel into moral respectability and the turn to anti-heroic discourse. The novels of Daniel Defoe (works influenced by rogue narratives) show little interest in representations of feminine virtue of the kind Richardson foregrounds in his influential Pamela. Where Defoe represents martial violence with relatively few reservations, in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, a concern with feminine virtue is accompanied by anti-heroic discourse which entails critical views of war. As novelists, Fielding and Smollett both represent the malign effects of modern war while, in Amelia, Fielding even represents a form of pacifist feeling. The chapter ends with discussion of the anonymous Ephraim Tristram Bates, in which a potentially excellent soldier is defeated by a corrupt system of military patronage, and of Sternes Tristram Shandy, in which martial virtue has become a matter of moral sentiment, destructive of domestic order.

The third chapter suggests that The Spectator’s characters set important precedents of diversion, originality and realism for the caricature talk that constituted realist character in the critical recognition and writing of the Romantic novel. The second part of the chapter shows how anti-caricature rhetoric became conventionalised in late eighteenth-century essays that sought to explain and promote the appeal of Addison and Steele’s character ’Sir Roger De Coverley’.

The fifth chapter explores how concepts of caricature interacted with historical romance in the critical reception and writing of Walter Scott’s characters. I explore Scott’s association of pictorial caricature with accuracy, particularity and referentiality, looking in particular at The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Guy Mannering, and suggesting the implications of John Kay’s caricatures for Scott’s ’compendious realism’. Scott’s defences of historical ’caricature’ – in his essay on Tobias Smollett and in the Magnum Opus edition of The Monastery – are a counterpoint to the anti-caricature rhetoric used to disparage his novels. Returning to the realist device of the ’explained caricature’, I differentiate national caricatures of the Scots and Jewish ’body-corporate’ in Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Ivanhoe.

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift tacitly drew his first readers’ attention to two forms of popular fiction: imaginary voyages in the manner of Lucian’s True History, and the pseudo-autobiographical fictitious travellers’ tales made familiar by The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ‘Written by Himself’. Contemporaries recognised the rhetorical similarities between the True History and Swift’s ironic manner, and there are clear plot resemblances. There is also evidence that contemporaries associated Gulliver’s Travels with the pseudo-autobiographical narratives made popular by Defoe, perhaps because Swift included the same sort of circumstantial autobiographical detail. Whether this makes Gulliver’s Travels a ‘parodying novel’ is an interesting question. It was routinely included in lists of novels in the century following its initial publication, which suggests that eighteenth-century readers had no difficulty appreciating that, if Gulliver’s Travels was not a novel, it was unquestionably working within a recognisable popular literary tradition.

This chapter examines the politics of postmodern metafiction. Starting from the widespread view that 1970s postmodernism was “politically abortive” and interested primarily in language games, the chapter sets out to rethink this position. Turning back to the coining of the term “metafiction” by William Gass and considering some major examples of the form (including work by Kurt Vonnegut, among others), the opening half of the chapter introduces the idea that there is a lurking sense of identity politics beneath much canonical metafiction. Tracing lines of continuity with the work of white male modernist authors, the model of metafictional “author gods” is critically examined. The chapter goes on to establish a counter-tradition, making use of the work of bell hooks and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to explore texts that use metafictional devices while resisting any illusion of supra-textual mastery. Samuel R. Delany’s metafictional science fiction epic Dhalgren is posited as the exemplar of this counter-tradition. The chapter makes the case that Delany’s text, overlooked by many scholars of the form, should sit at the center of any discussion of 1970s metafiction. The conclusion includes a brief survey of the implicit politics detectable in some recent examples of metafictional writing.

In the final edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Smith recommends several literary authors – Racine and Voltaire, Richardson, Marivaux, and Riccoboni – as “much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus,” specifically in their illustrations of relationships of love and friendship as well as the “private and domestic affections,” like “parental tenderness” and “filial piety” (III.3.13-4). Smith does not here explain how literature performs this instructive function, and his remarks on the function of literature are scattered across TMS and the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. This chapter contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Smith and literature by focusing closely on this recommendation, elucidating the instructive potential of the early novel, and showing how well suited the techniques of that form are to the goals and challenges of Smith’s sentimentalist moral philosophy. By examining shared themes and formal features of the novels of Samuel Richardson, Pierre Marivaux, and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, I show how a reader’s engagement with these novels helps to enable and train their skills as an impartial and sympathetic spectator.

This chapter tracks the ways in which migration has shaped the South Asian novel. It provides an overview of key writers and novels from South Asia and the "new" diaspora to understand the possibilities and limitations inherent in diaspora as a critical category. Diaspora, as a paradigm, often risks anti-historical or de-historicized readings of literary texts and their deep engagements with history. One may often risk attention to form when diaspora becomes the analytic rubric for the study of the vast body of anglophone South Asian literature. The chapter concentrates on novels that circulate among scholars and readers in the United States, United Kingdom, and to some extent Canada, and concludes by gesturing to what gets left out when diaspora becomes the reigning paradigm for understanding the long and deep history of South Asian literature in English.

This chapter is an abstract of a paper that argued that historians of Greek civic culture in the Roman Empire should draw on the novels for details of Greek city life, of the behaviour of its elites, and of the relation between city and country – something Fergus Millar did, quite independently, and very effectively, in his UCL inaugural lecture ‘The world of the Golden Ass’ in March 1981.

This chapter argues against the view of Perry 1967 (to some extent endorsed by Reardon 1971) that the novels were popular literature, written for a juvenile readership and ‘for the edification of children and the poor-in-spirit’: rather, it suggests, the intertextuality with high literature of the classical period and the level of education it implied point to an elite readership, among whom some of the few women to receive such an education were doubtless numbered.