The story of the novel's emergence can be told differently depending on what you think a novel actually is. And depending on how you define the novel, you could attribute its emergence to the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern empire of the ancient Greeks or to England over a millennium and a half later. So the divergence is enormous, both geographically and temporally: on the one hand, the novel is the product of a culturally hybrid classical antiquity, and, on the other, the outcome of Britain's transition into a capitalist modernity. This chapter surveys some very different accounts of the origins of the novel, and it turns in closing to a follow-up question: why do we want to be able to pinpoint when, where, and how the novel emerged?

Dates and definitions

“This book is the revelation of a very well-kept secret,” Margaret Anne Doody writes in the opening line of The True Story of the Novel (1996): “that the Novel as a form of literature in the West has a continuous history of about two thousand years.” Doody goes on to offer a history of prose narrative which suggests that the novel is as old as Western civilization itself, beginning with ancient Greek fictions written around the time of Christ, among them those works that Bakhtin had considered when he sought to distinguish the irreverent novel from the stately classical epic. But are these all really novels?