Edited by Franco Moretti, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, this is a translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo. The Novel’s two volumes are a multi-authored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Il Mattino said of the Italian edition ‘It is not a book. It is a Pantagruelian feast that awakens limitless appetites. It helps to remind us how many flavours can be found in literature and – above all – how many we have lost by eating fast food for the brain’. Some highlights:

Fredric Jameson on ‘Providence and Realism’
Jack Goody on the anthropology of the story
Tomas Hägg on the ancient Greek novel
Perry Anderson on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters
Umberto Eco on Victor Hugo
Juliet Mitchell on Natasha and Hélène in Tolstoy’s War and Peace
Henry Y. H. Zhao on ‘Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture’
Mieke Bal on novelistic time
Eileen Julien on ‘The Extroverted African Novel’
Valentine Cunningham on Tess of the D’Urbevilles
Homi Bhabha on Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Declan Kiberd on Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy
Meenakshi Mukherjee on Epic and the Novel in India

Princeton | hardback |ISBN: 9780691049472