Fresh Ideas: The death of the novel

From the Times Literary Supplement: "Any number of critics have regurgitated the idea that the novel as we know it today persists in a kind of zombie state, stripped of whatever vital essence it once had (and this in spite of the fact that novels are being published and consumed in unprecedented numbers). But the argument for the novel's demise has its own kind of ghoulish quality to it by now.

“Another observation is that every post-war jeremiad about ‘the death of the novel’ – from Lionel Trilling’s study “The Liberal Imagination” (1950) to Will Self’s essay ‘The Novel Is Dead (this time it’s for real)’ (2014) – tends to draw on the same limited set of ideas. …

“The novel is said to be dead or dying either because it has been made obsolete by new technology, because it has become radically out of sync with the values of the culture around it, or because it has no further capacity for innovation. At this stage, what bears thinking about surely isn’t – or isn’t just – how the novel carries on in the face of these old claims, but why the argument about its life or death keeps reappearing.

Read the original essay here.

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