ABSTRACT
It would be perfectly possible to write the history of the European novel, at least since Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in terms which place a central emphasis upon its use of parody. In such a critical history, the novel establishes itself and its credentials for serious consideration by the deployment of parody, which it uses to devalue alternative genres and their ways of depicting the world. Central to this account, which does exist, though my emphasis on parody (rather than irony) is unusual, is the distinction between the novel and romance. This genre has been the butt of parody since Cervantes, though, as we shall see, many other genres have come to take the place of romance as the object of novelistic attack via parody.1 Romance is above all the genre of wish-fulfilment, ruled by coincidence and wonder-which are other names for the action of Providence. The novel, by contrast, is a more fully secular genre, inhabiting the world as it is and not as it might be, and consistently debunking the claims of romance by making them bump up against the harder, but also more ordinary, facts of existence.
