Novel a biography schmidt

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling.
The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling.
Schmidt's simple premise is that fiction is a living organism, with all novels related in some way to one another.

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The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt

Cambridge, Mass. / London. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780674724730

With neither footnotes nor endnotes nor a lengthy bibliography, Michael Schmidt’s 1,172-page study of the novel in English is not for specialists digging for secondary sources. With a timeline and an extensive index of authors, however, the book should appeal to general readers interested in the sheer variety of and interplay among authors and their novels.

My copy displays two titles: The Novel: A Biography on the cover and title page, making it official, and A Life of the Novel along the hardback spine. Schmidt disclaims any master theory or strictly chronological order, grouping short biographies and books into chapters by technique or theme. For instance, Aphra Behn is placed with Zora Neale Hurston in “Enter America.” He is interested in kinships, how authors influence, extend, and react to one another, in order to determine their literary “families.” Given forty-five chapters of different families, the book could be titled Lives o

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The Novel: A Biography

March 16, 2018
UPDATE

I still think this mighty beast is great but it’s great like the Grand Canyon and quite often when I read a paragraph I get a feeling that Michael Schmidt is just too clever/cultured/informed/lofty for the likes of me. I mean, great God, he’s read like everything… is he 200 years old or does he have the time stopping power of The Fermata like in Nicholson Baker? Here’s an example. On p74 he discusses Daniel Defoe. (I have only read Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.) He contrasts Defoe with Aphra Behn, a novelist very few people now read, so he has me at an advantage already. I have to take his word for all things Aphra related.

What Defoe has and Behn lacks is a developed dissenting conscience. This gives his novels, in a first person that is dogmatically rooted, focus and direction. Like her, he writes for effect, but the effects he strives for are moral, a morality anachronistic and problematic.

1) What does he mean by “dissenting”? I think he’s referring to the special historical meaning of this word relating to the establ
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Frederic Raphael
I should, perhaps, begin by saying that Michael Schmidt is my friend and, quite frequently, my publisher. Ought this to disqualify me from reviewing his mammoth study of fiction in its full-length, prose form? I can say only that if I did not admire it, I would not have agreed to write this review. The Novel: A Biography is a marvel of sustained attention, responsiveness, tolerance and intelligence.
Schmidt, more Aristotelian than Platonist, treats the novel, in its sprawling or neat forms, as a natural phenomenon, to be honoured and tabulated in all its diversity; but he refuses to clamp a measure on what deserves the title or best merits it. He is as close to omnivorous as a man of decided taste can be. F R Leavis’s The Great Tradition, with its scrutineering scowl, has no leverage here.
Schmidt celebrates what John Bayley called ‘the uses of division’: fiction is a ‘way of telling the truth … because it wears the mask of truth and marshals facts and seeming facts into plausible narratives’. Later – crucially, to my ears – Schmidt quotes Ben Jonson’s ‘Spe