What is the novel? The answer to this seemingly simple question depends, of course, on whom you ask, and what perspective they are thinking from, whether they are literary critics or book historians, media scholars, publishers, or readers. To the literary critic, the novel is a particular form, less frequently a genre (cf. McKeon 2000: 15; Bode 2011: x), one which is immediately connected to modernity itself (McKeon 2000: 16), and one whose properties are almost by definition mutable. In J. A. Cuddon’s pithy and exemplary definition, the novel is “a wide variety of writings whose only common attribute is that they are extended pieces of prose fiction” (1998: 560). Indeed, few critics today even ask the question: Lawrence Buell does not ask what the novel is in the Dream of the Great American Novel (2014) any more than Peter Boxall does when he reflects upon the Value of the Novel (2015) (two examples we cite here without prejudice, since see also, and inter alia, Bradford 2007, Head 2008, O’Donnell 2010, Dix, Jervis, Gill and Jenner 2011, Müller 2017‚ Caserio 2009 or in more colloquial formats Garber 2011 and Lesser 2014). For literary critics, what the novel is is less important than what it does, or what its cultural value is, how it works in and on society, and so on. That it recognizably exists, and that it is recognizable as itself, is simply taken for granted. Similarly, if you are a consumer of novels—a buyer and reader of novels—then what the novel is may also appear quite clear. It is a book you buy, whether in hardcover, paperback, or as an electronic file, and it is often helpfully self-identified—“A Novel” printed below the title of the book as a paratext, which Genette has elaborated on (1987). Presented with the “immense accumulation of commodities” (Marx 1987: 1) available in every bookshop whether brick and mortar or digital, whether selling new or used wares, it is a commodity among others, sitting on the “Fiction” shelves near cookbooks, travel guides, self-help volumes, history and non-fiction, coloring books, poetry, and so on. But like the literary critic, readers may not worry too deeply about what it is. And indeed, even if we assume that publishers care about literary definitions, it may also be that for them, what the novel is is less important than what publishers can sell as a novel (precisely because buyers and readers are not much concerned with what the novel is, either). Publishers may likely focus on which novels are bestsellers, and which might be prize material. They will certainly be worried about what sales of novels mean for their bottom lines, either financially or with regard to their cultural capital, even as they make their money precisely with those celebrity memoirs which the novel shares its commercial spaces with. And lastly though not finally, if you are not a prose reader at all—if you are a TV viewer, or a someone who prefers comics, or podcasts, or who plays videogames, you may feel yourself unwilling to commit to an idea of what the novel is at all; what the novel is, to you, may simply not be very interesting, even as the various media you consume or interact with connect themselves both formally and culturally to the novel.
This also goes for the scholarship which is connected to these vastly different perspectives on the novel. We have already noted that this is true for literary scholarship; it also appears to be largely true for scholarship in publishing and book studies. While John B. Thompson’s seminal study of the publishing industry, Merchants of Culture, frequently touches upon the publishing, editing, selling, and buying of novels, it is hardly interested at all in the novel as a form; nor are Jodie Archer and Matthew Jocker in their The Bestseller Code (2016). That is, they do not consider what makes the novel a novel both from the perspective of the people making it and from the perspective of the people buying it. The rarer studies of novel readers likewise are less interested in novel readers as readers, specifically, of novels: neither Janice Radway’s seminal Reading the Romance (1984) nor Jim Collins’s groundbreaking Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010) defines the novel, focusing instead on what people do with it.
It may seem counterintuitive to begin a book about the novel today with anecdotes detailing the way nobody cares about what the novel is. But, we suggest, this is actually a crucial point of departure: what the novel actually is has taken a backseat to the various ways in which it functions as a designator of form, reading practices, commodity production, and prestige among other things. This volume aims to return critical attention to the question that these re-orientations elide, the quasi-ontological question of what the novel today actually is.
So what is the novel? This volume may not conclusively answer this deceptively simple question. But we will offer what we take to be a meaningful position toward it. We will discuss why and how in everyday practice, what the novel is can be left largely open: readers, publishers, authors do not have to care too deeply about what the novel is, because it is all of the things we sketch above. The novel is a literary form and a physical commodity, a means of claiming cultural prestige and a point of reference, a source of styles and a receptacle for new technologies. The novel is many things to many people; but that does not mean it is an empty signifier, or ever elusive. Rather, as we will argue with the help of our contributors, it is seen as such because people tend to focus on the novel’s relevance to their own position in a large network of connections. It is this network of connections which, we will contend, can be most meaningfully described as what the novel “is,” and which leads us to the idea of the “novel network.” In offering a theorization and a selection of practical examples of what it means to emphasize the need to read the novel as a network of relations, we hope to contribute to the theory of the novel, by thinking it anew at a moment when more than ever before the name novel has become available in an ever-increasing number of contexts.
To be sure, the novel has, for a long time now, been considered a constitutively open form (beginning with Bakhtin 1981; see also Nilges in this volume), one whose very capacity to adapt to the changes and circumstances of its day have ensured its longevity over the centuries. Such arguments have, by and large, however, focused on the novel’s capacity to adapt, adopting genres and styles, and seeking its place as a mediator between high-cultural and popular forms. Less often, these changes have been read as material changes; or as changes of its place in the medial landscape—these, as we will go on to discuss, have usually figured as threats to the novel, not as elements which it too adapts, adopts, and influences. Yet the present moment appears as one that most fundamentally requires such a perspective, and requires us to understand these shifts in the novel’s medial presence not as a threat, but as a constitutive part of what the novel today is. The following is but a sample of the ways the novel—as traditionally conceived—seems to come under pressure: from TV increasingly touting its narrative capacity; from the comic picking up the novel’s name in the “graphic novel” (see Pizzino 2016); from shifts in publishing toward electronic, often radically open ways of putting out fictional long-form writing (see McGurl 2016)—“writing conceived without the guardrails of the book,” as Juliet Fleming says (2016: 2); from electronic reading devices and apps making the possibility of interactive gamebooks like the 1980s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books mainstream (see Hendrix 2011; Hungerford 2016: 93–118); from digital print technology opening the way for scrapbook fiction like Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s S. (2013; see also Panko in this volume); and from conglomerate publishers under economic pressure doing what Thompson calls “extreme publishing,” unable to grow authors and help create carefully crafted novels but rather focused on finding this season’s multimedia-ready plot (see Thompson 2012: 223–291); to name a few. In our perspective, these aspects of contemporary cultural production are part and parcel of what the novel is today.
Such a perspective opens a way for rethinking the return of largely traditional arguments about the novel’s incipient demise in the face of technological changes: “the same anxieties crop up whenever one form of communication or expression begins to feel threatened by a newer form” (Fitzpatrick 2006: 9). The British novelist Will Self claimed in the Guardian in 2014 that “The Novel is Dead,” adding with parenthetical self-awareness: “(This time it’s for real).” He has repeated this contention elsewhere, such as at literary festivals. Self’s focus on the “literary novel” (for which see also Lanzendörfer in this volume) certainly further limits his claim. “I do not mean that narrative fiction tout court is dying—the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health,” he somewhat condescendingly concedes, but his catalog of grievances—24-hour-news channels, Quality TV, electronic publishing, a general cultural decline in which people cannot concentrate long enough anymore to read anything but Twitter—clearly suggests a solipsism in reading the novel’s state. Focusing on the codex form, Self’s argument fails to recognize the myriad ways in which the novel remains relevant, and promises to be so in the future, if understood in the expansive way we propose to. Self’s claim that the novel is a “form of content specifically adapted” to the physical codex (2014) is certainly as historically true as it is apocalyptic in its assumed consequences: that, on the one hand, the codex form is dying (see Gomez 2008; Striphas 2009), and that, on the other, the novel will not be able to adapt to this shift as it has adapted to numerous others before. The famous malleability of the novel-form, most emphatically stressed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), does however appear fully capable of sustaining not just the generic, but also the physical changes which it is currently undergoing. As China Miéville has noted, “you don’t radically restructure how the novel’s distributed and not have an impact on its form” (2014: 43). We would go a step further, perhaps, and suggest that you don’t change how the novel is made (written and edited, printed and published, distributed, sold, bought, and consumed) without changing what the novel is. This was true in the past, as Peter Sto...