A history of European novelists from Miguel de Cervantes to Milan Kundera could be told in many ways, all of them partial. While the present volume is not a continuous history, the introductory and concluding essays, along with the Index, offer coordinates for linking the chosen writers' contributions not just to the novel, but to the idea of the novel, in Europe as it acquired a growing consciousness of itself as a distinctive artistic genre and as providing the most complete, complex and intimate form of self-inspection for modern social man.

This is a question of truth claims as much as subject-matter, and the nature of its own truth-telling has been a constant preoccupation of the form. The novel grew partly from non-literary genres, such as letters, memoirs and histories, with which it has maintained an ambiguous relation. Even while progressively defining itself as artistically distinct, the novel has repeatedly stolen the clothes of these non-literary forms. It has continued to invoke other sources of authority, whether scientific, historical or philosophical, even as it has affirmed its own special value as fiction. Honoré de Balzac's declaration in the opening chapter of Le Père Goriot, ‘All is true’, expresses this ambition in a bold, but elusive, formula. Hence, the problematic, if unavoidable, term ‘realism’ denotes not a single mode of representation so much as a complex, shifting ambition to give fiction a weight of historical or sociological insight. An inevitable starting-point for the truth-telling ambitions of the form is the fraught relation of ‘realism’ to ‘romance’.