ABSTRACT
I’ll begin with a narrative. Years ago in graduate school, as I became aware of the novel as something to study as well as to read, my eye was caught by two recent books whose claim was that the novel was getting a lot more attention than it deserved. Although very different in other respects, both Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and Scholes and Kellogg’s The Nature of Narrative made the point that in those days, the dominance of novel studies was such that to speak of the novel, it seemed, was to speak of narrative as such. Their influential books argued that it was time to put the novel genre in its place by resituating it within the narrative mode, thereby throwing into relief all the other genres that had preceded it.
