Partial Magic : The Novel As Self-Conscious Genre [first edition]

This new work by an imaginative critic of vigorous intellectual powers radically revises our understanding of the novel as a genre. Against a variety of critical stances, from Marxist and Freudian to Jamesian and Leavisite, Mr. Alter argues that "realism" is by no means the exclusive generic aim of the novel. He maintains that the novel, beginning from Cervantes with the erosion of belief in the authority of the written word, has been much more essentially playful and inquisitively philosophical than prevailing critical notions allow. Mr. Alter explores the writer's pleasure in the extravagant manipulation of narrative artifice in a line of major self-conscious novelists from the late seventeenth century to the present - Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Thackeray, Melville, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gide and Nabokov. His readings of particular masterworks of fiction are combined with a large historical overview which brings us finally to a consideration of the confusions and emerging possibilities of the contemporary period. Written in a lucid, lively, non-technical style, this book significantly expands our understanding of the novel and the ways in which it delights us and engages us most deeply.