The Novel

Despite pioneering studies, the term "romance novel" itself has not been subjected to scrutiny. This study examines mass-market romance fiction in the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. through four categories: capitalism, war, heterosexuality, and white Protestantism to cast a fresh light on the genre. Adopting Michel Foucault's idea of the 'episteme,' Jayashree Kamble argues that romance novels are a quintessentially twentieth and twenty-first century genre and rooted in the real world conditions (episteme) that correspond to the four elements above. As such, romance fiction provides a prismatic look at the struggles around globalization, 'democratic' armed aggression, heteropatriarchy, and historically Protestant values, particularly as understood by the genre's readers and authors.

Enlightenment Orientalism rewrites the history of the novel by restoring consideration of a range of texts (and overlooked aspects of oft-read works) systematically excluded because they failed to fit existing notions of domestic realism. Aravamudan anchors his alternative genealogy in more capacious conceptions of the novel and inverts the usual understanding of Orientalism as restrictive stereotype to instead ask why Orientalism was so productive of cultural products in European literature. The subgenre of enlightenment Orientalism evinces a heteroglossia that exceeds national realism, and recuperating this broader fictional landscape allows readers to recognize a range of texts otherwise taken to be strange because it falls between genres (transgeneric) or between national spaces (intercultural). Taking the novel to be a cultural transportation device, Aravamudan describes this broader fictional ensemble as an investigative tool that is an alternative to the nation-centered novel after the mid-eighteenth century.

This article attempts two things. First, it aims to reassess the literary criticism that Georg Lukács produced in the 1930s while he was living in the Soviet Union in light of his earlier, and much-esteemed, The theory of the novel. Second, in order to carry out this reassessment, it examines the place of Hegelian aesthetics in Lukács’s theorization of realism in the 1930s criticism, in relation both to contemporary Soviet writings on the subject and to his own earlier, ostensibly Hegelian work. I argue that, at least in terms of the place of art in the historical dialectic, the later work is more consistent with Hegelian philosophy than The theory of the novel.