ABSTRACT
The visitor at Oxford, like the stranger at Athens, knows very well that he is a barbarian. This wholesome piece of self-knowledge is made quite palatable by the extraordinary hospitality with which he is nonetheless made to feel at home. It would be too much and too little to say that the ancient world was, like Ernest Hemingway's collection of short stories, a world of Men without Women. After the Third Estate had come to power, the novel could come into its own. Hitherto it had been regarded as an illegitimate stepchild, a paradoxical hybrid; when traditional forms were wedded to modern themes, the result was mock-epic or antiromance; when Furetiere spoke of "a bourgeois romance" or Fielding of "a comic epic in prose", they were speaking of contradictions in terms. The hypothesis is worth entertaining, however, so long as we do not allow it to become a thesis.
