The Life of the Novel

The book by Franco-Romanian literary scholar and critic Toma Pavel offers readers an original history of the main fictional genre.

According to the author, the evolution of the novel is determined by the tension contained within it. By combining various approaches to the study of literature, Pavel shows the internal logic of the genre's development and the dialogue that novels have «conducted» with each other — he reveals the continuity between the idealism of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the realism of the Modern era, and the form- and subjectivity-cultivating modernism of the 20th-21st centuries. 

In each of these periods, the novel reveals a rupture between the hero and the surrounding environment and poses the axiological question of whether the moral ideal of a person is part of the world order.