1975
First Published
3.85
Average Rating
264
Number of Pages
This new work by an imaginative critic of vigorous intellectual powers radically revises our understanding of the novel as a genre. Against a variety of critical stances, from Marxist and Freudian to Jamesian and Leavisite, Mr. Alter argues that "realism" is by no means the exclusive generic aim of the novel. He maintains that the novel, beginning from Cervantes with the erosion of belief in the authority of the written word, has been much more essentially playful and inquisitively philosophical than prevailing critical notions allow. Mr. Alter explores the writer's pleasure in the extravagant manipulation of narrative artifice in a line of major self-conscious novelists from the late seventeenth century to the present - Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Thackeray, Melville, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gide and Nabokov. His readings of particular masterworks of fiction are combined with a large historical overview which brings us finally to a consideration of the confusions and emerging possibilities of the contemporary period. Written in a lucid, lively, non-technical style, this book significantly expands our understanding of the novel and the ways in which it delights us and engages us most deeply.
Avg Rating
3.85
Number of Ratings
20
5 STARS
25%
4 STARS
45%
3 STARS
20%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
0%
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Author
Robert Alter
Author · 22 books
Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967, and has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature.
