The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947

" The Novel-Essay is . . . a necessary step not just to understand the crisis of modernity or to study the premises of the ideology of postmodernism it is a chapter of the history of the novel which will allow us to understand the development of our society through the mirror of literary forms. " - Los Angeles Review of Books

" Bold and well-argued, Ercolino' s book focuses on the novel-essay, a genre that emerged following the great crisis of the epistemological and symbolic apparatuses of modernity . . . An exceptionally gifted specialist in the history and theory of the novel, Ercolino steps forward dauntlessly. His book is compact and dense . . . Ercolino is a scholar of enviable brilliance. " - Remo Ceserani, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, University of Bologna, Italy, Alias domenica Il manifesto

" In an unusual combination, Ercolino is highly skilled at both close- and far-reading. His readers will appreciate the book' s readable prose, its compressed argumentation, and its smooth synthesis of complex and varied discourses. He deftly analyzes the relationship between the novel-essay and Zolian naturalism, Cartesian rationality, the Bildungsroman, and philosophical mimesis. He demonstrates a deep understanding of the literary and philosophical landscape in modern Europe and includes even the most contemporary literary scholarship, including references to Franco Moretti' s collaborative projects at the Stanford Literary Lab. This book is a must-read for specialists of the novel and the essay, and a helpful contribution for historians, philosophers, and cultural critics who focus on modernity and its transition into postmodernity. I anticipate that in our new millennium, Ercolino' s will be the first of many upcoming analyses of one of the most fascinating hybrid literary forms to emerge in Europe since the last century. It is refreshing to find a new voice on the touchy question of essayistic fiction, which has been lacking since the illuminating contributions of Thomas Harrison and Claire de Obaldia. Ercolino' s wide-ranging analysis delivers what it promises. One could say that he synthesizes major theories of the essay and the novel as separate genres into a new, dialectically integrated theory of the novel-essay, as though the criticism of a hybrid genre must also be hybrid. " - Christy Wampole, Princeton University, USA, Modernism/modernity

" Stefano Ercolino' s book is a splendid rediscovery of one of the most important modern narrative genres, the novel-essay. By showing how the various authors of novel-essays - J. -K. Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Hermann Broch - propose a wide range of syntheses between thought and action, Ercolino' s book offers a nuanced, innovative, and memorable view of modernity itself . . . Ercolino' s beautiful, nuanced, and innovative work is one of the most notable recent debuts in literary history. " - Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in French and Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, USA, Strumenti critici, and author of The Lives of the Novel

" The daring hypothesis of Ercolino' s study - which ranges over a half century of literary history, over a half-dozen writers of the likes of Musil, Dostoevsky, Mann, and Huysmans, and over the insights of even more numerous literary theorists - is that the hybrid aesthetics of the novel-essay does not merely enact the symbolic crisis of modernist thinking; it also furnishes the most resounding intellectual reply. " - Thomas Harrison, Professor of Italian, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

" The greatest achievement of the [book' s] broad-ranging analysis . . . is being able and willing to tackle literary works - even some of the classics of our tradition - within dynamic systems such as genres, through which texts can describe effectively . . . the symbolic changes that took place in society and history. " - Guido Mattia Gallerani, ITEM (Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes), ENS-CNRS, France, Between