The Novel: An Alternative History

Author Steven Moore argues against the grain that the novel didn't arise in 17th-century Europe or, indeed, with Cervantes in Spain as most scholars would argue. He, along with a few others, maintain that it began with civilisation itself and proceeds to take us on a grand tour of world literature from its very beginnings until 1600AD.

This volume is the first of a planned duo. Yet Moore offers no definition of what he considers to be a novel, and certainly doesn't view literature as having a significant relationship with social or economic developments.

The novel as a specific literary form was very much associated with emergent capitalism and the centrality of the individual protagonist. It was written for private consumption, not recital or communal catharsis as most earlier literary genres were.

The full flowering of the novel certainly came about in 19th-century Europe, helped by mechanised printing presses and cheaper printing methods giving it a much wider audience than any previous literature could have enjoyed. This in itself changed and influenced its specific literary form.

The novel is usually written in story form, not composed of traditional plots of myth and legend, and is contrasted with "romance." In most cases a novel is about characters, their evolution and their everyday actions with emphasis on the "novelty" of the narrative.

Moore is incredibly knowledgeable and provides us with a long list of examples of literature from early Assyrian stories through ancient Hebrew and Greek fiction, to medieval and Renaissance narratives. But he doesn't attempt to put these in the context of their specific societies.

He gives us plot summaries and quotations to illustrate the inventiveness and richness of this early literature, as if this alone makes them "novels." To give an example of his often oxymoronic interpretation, he writes of "Ireland's rich heritage of oral literature." The fact that literary expression has been with us since civilisation began, and that earlier literary forms, ideas and narratives are reworked and can be rediscovered in later ones, is hardly a unique insight and certainly doesn't make all and every literary work a novel.