‘Portrait of a Novel’ looks at Henry James and the bridge to modernism -- a notable review of Michael Gorra's book on James' Portrait of a Lady.


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The saga continues...
Opening of Volume II of
The Novel: An Alternative History: 1600-1800,
on Don Quixote,
at the College Hill Review.
Forthcoming August 2013...order it now at The Book Depository and other booksellers.

                       




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"You're unlikely to find a wittier, more ingenious, more compulsively readable novel this year," says Steven Moore in a Washington Post review of Daisy Buchanan's Daughter by Tom Carson, published by Paycock Press. Read more here...and more about the book here.

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The novel is centuries older than we've been told
Steven Moore's longish post at The Guardian's Books Blog, on how he came to view the novel as having a very long history, and to write The Novel: An Alternative History, to demonstrate this..

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Steven Moore's new book
The Novel: An Alternative History
is out, published by Continuum Books.
CLICK FOR EXCERPTS AT THE PUBLISHER'S WEB SITE

From the dust jacket description --
Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote (1605), but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the premodern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these premodern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny.

Though Moore regards literary novels primarily as "performances" – authorial displays of style and technique – he does not neglect their value as cultural criticism. For the history of the novel is also the history of the rivalry between secular literature and sacred scripture. Indeed, Moore holds that the “secular scriptures” of literature provide a better guide to life than sacred scriptures (fictions of a different sort). Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining— The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.

Albert Manguel review at the
Washington Post, August 22, 2010.

Interview focusing on The Novel
at Porter Square Books, June 9, 2010

Rain Taxi review by Scott Bryan Wilson,
in pdf format, Summer 2010 print edition

A review at Bomb magazine
by Justin McNeil, April 7, 2010.

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Steven Moore interviewed by Splice Today online magazine about his penchant for big brainy novels, and other matters .
http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/interview-steven-moore

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SM gets blogged re The Novel early on :
Eugene Lim's Reading Diary, 23 November 2008
"Independing scholar" Steven Moore is writing a history of the novel
http://www.eugenelim.com/2008/11/23/%E2%80%9Cindependent-scholar%E2%80%9D-steven-moore-is-writing-a-history-of-the-novel/

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Not current or, actually, recent: Steven Moore interviewed on Pynchon:
In 1997 Steven Moore was interviewed by CNN for a feature on Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. The video of the little feature can be viewed here, and the related story, which only quotes one of the video interviewees, and that one is not Steven Moore, is here:
http://www.cnn.com/US/9706/05/pynchon/

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