Novel

Steven Moore's earlier book, The Novel: an alternative history, beginnings to 1600, looked at the world's earliest novels. This sequel picks up the story in 1600 and follows the form to 1800, from Don Quixote to Modern Chivalry, America's first big novel and a tribute to Cervantes.

The period produced classics such as Tom Jones, Candide and Dangerous Liaisons, but Moore also looks well beyond the dozen or so familiar names. Hundreds of other novels from these years are known mainly to specialists, including Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, enormous Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English works and the earliest American fiction. Moore argues that these lesser-known books are worth reading in their own right and also supply the context needed to see why the major novels were such breakthroughs.

The book shows the novel growing rapidly as writers tried out new forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips and family sagas. There were also odd, hard-to-classify experiments that resemble modern avant-garde fiction. As in his first volume, Moore concentrates on the innovators and outsiders who kept the novel fresh. He examines more than 400 novels from around the world in a lively, accessible style.