This seminar seeks to reinvigorate the function of novel theory in our contemporary moment.  Rather than seeking a “new” totalizing theory for this moment, we propose understanding it as a wide-ranging genre that can blend with others—the essay, the periodical, life writing, the novel itself—and that can be generated by novelists reflecting upon their own craft as much as by the meditations of critics and philosophers. We hope to generate a discussion about the past and present of novel theory, tracing alternative lineages for the theory of the novel that help us to understand the vitality and resilience of this field of thought in the twenty-first century. 

Literary studies tends to distinguish “novel theory” from other types of thinking about the novel, especially that of novelists themselves. When novelists reflect on the novel form, such work falls in the realms of “craft” or “art” rather than the critical attention of theory associated with the venerable names of Lukács and Bakhtin. Novel theory signals seriousness and concern with the political, philosophical, historical, and social value of the novel, whereas the "craft of fiction," to use Percy Lubbock's phrase, seems most concerned with the phenomenology of novel-writing and novel-reading and the novel’s function as art. The writings of novelists like Henry Fielding, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Zadie Smith, and Akwaeke Emezi have been understood as contributing to novel theory but have not been understood as novel theory. Yet, recently scholars have begun to see novel theory as a more capacious category that includes craft, life-writing, film theory, and novels themselves as novel theory.

We invite papers that take up novel theory from usual or surprising angles: 

• self-theorizing novels
• genre as theory
• autotheory of the novel
• craft writing as theory
• theories of reading
• seriality and serialization
• book history
• therapeutic reading
• book reviews and essays as theories