ABSTRACT
It is easy to think of the novel as a modern invention, our one distinctivelypostclassical contribution to the family of literary genres. Aesthetically its formlessness and apparently infinite versatility seem the antithesis of classical control; and intellectually the mode of realism, both social and psychological, so long dominant in our fiction appears to substitute an interest in unique individuals in a world of concrete particularities for the classical instinct that the specifics of this world only mask the true reality of abstract universals.
