Introduction

Abstract

The twentieth century was not exactly filled with optimism when it came to the novel. The form was believed to be in crisis at several points; with various noted critics suggesting that it was ‘dead’ or at the very least ‘irrelevant’. José Ortega y Gasset’s Decline of the Novel (1925) was the first in a series of meditations on the subject of the novel’s future, largely aimed at predicting, documenting and analysing its demise. Walter Benjamin continued this trend when only five years later in his 1930 essay Krisis des Romans (Crisis of the Novel) he suggests that the novel is ‘the most extreme and vertiginous, the last and most advanced stage of the old bourgeois bildungsroman’ (304). In the 1950s and 1960s, contributors to the discussion included Gore Vidal, Roland Barthes, and John Barth, and in the 1970s (amongst others) Tom Wolfe predicted that journalism would displace the work of novelists, who (he felt) had become disconnected from the social realities of American post-war life. He characterised authors in an unremittingly caustic tone, as: ‘all crowded into one phone booth … doing these poor, frantic little exercises in form’ (94). Indeed, in a century that famously saw a proliferation of different movements and schools within literature the prediction that the novel was at an end, or was somehow stunted by what were perceived to be narrow Victorian bourgeois roots, sometimes seemed to be the only shared belief amongst any (though never all) practitioners and commentators on the form.