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On Newness in the Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
No doubt you have noticed that the forms of literary production which show the most life today are lyric poetry, drama, and the novel;—and of these three, the greatest by far is the novel. Truly, the production in this field is now prodigious. A recent estimate was that the present winter season would see the publication in English of some three thousand works of fiction. The French critic, Georges Duhamel, acting recently as reviewer for the Mercure de France, says that for several years he was compelled to read between six and seven hundred novels annually; and this, he adds, required not only a stout heart and a good deal of patience, but even a good constitution, a certain physical resistance. A French publisher, announcing a new collection of novels, states that in France the novel is now the most “acute” (aigu) and the most “taking” (prenant) form of literary activity; that it dominates, at the present hour, the whole of modern literature.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1927
Footnotes
*
The Presidential Address, delivered at the Forty-third Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, Harvard University, December 30, 1926.
References
1 The actual expressions used are a shade coarser than these.
2 Dou Vilain qui conquist le Paradis, in Sechs altfrz. Fablels hgg. von Gerhard Rohlfs. Halle: Niemeyer, 1926.
3 I, 172.
4 Mr. George B. Ives' rendering of nulles nouvelles by ‘no thought’ is passable, but in my opinion does not quite hit the mark. The old Cotton-Hazlitt had ‘and not a word of death,‘ which is better.
5 Reading, with the MS, escug, from escoire (Levy).
6 Suchier, Denkmäler, I, 269.