Cultural Institutions of the Novel.

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-JUN-00

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University Press

Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deirdre Lynch and William B. Warner. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 489 pp. ISBN 0-8223-1843-1 paper.

This is an important collection challenging the conventional genealogies of the novel. Deirdre Lynch, William Warner, and the contributors contest the rise-of-the-novel thesis that has held sway since Ian Watt published his seminal book The Rise of the Novel in 1957. As the editors rightly point out, the novel has played a hegemonic role in the formation of the literary canon. Believed by many critics to be a uniquely Western form that catalyzed print culture to serve the interests of the rising European bourgeoisie, the novel has always been regarded as alien to non-Western societies and...

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