From Myth to Modernism

This survey traces the novel and its narrative ancestors across many cultures rather than along a single national line. Phelps begins with myth, epic, and early prose tale in the ancient Near East, Greece, India, China, and the medieval West, then follows the rise of the long prose fiction that came to be called the novel. A first movement runs from those origins toward realism; a second follows the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into modernist experiment. He discusses representative works and the social conditions that shaped them, arguing that the form is international. The book is a guided history of narrative, not a set of plot summaries.

Quarter bound in green cloth, grey-brown paper boards with a pattern in red, blue and gold by Anna Murray. Green endleaves. Dark red slipcase.