For almost 300 years, the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world — the device by which we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves. Something new came into art during the transition out of the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Reformation, and into the modern age. We might call it the turn to the interior — an increasing agreement that domestic life and drama are real, not merely minor activities necessary to keep body and soul together while we play out our real lives on the world’s stage.
Think how rare domestic drama was before the novel. Penelope spins not so much private life as politics in her domestic settings in the Odyssey, Dido lays down the markers of history in the Aeneid and the goddess Ishtar performs something like theogony with her anger in Gilgamesh.
Read Full Article »