Approaches to the Novel

This new series from Oxford University Press is the first international book series to be dedicated to the study of the novel, a literary form that has inspired some of the most exciting recent work in literary studies. It provides a forum for new scholarship that seeks to contribute to the theorization of the novel as a genre. That theorization encompasses questions of formal and thematic structure and questions of the history, dissemination, and social force of the novel. We do not publish studies that are primarily focused on a single author or that are primarily historical rather than theoretical in their approach.

The series encourages a comparative perspective, including analyses of the global circulation of texts in translation. It will explore the early as well as the recent history of the genre, in both canonical and non-canonical sub-genres, and will seek to deal with the full linguistic and material diversity of the novel’s manifestations. It will be equally at home investigating the novel of late antiquity, the Chinese and Japanese, Marathi or Arabic novel, and the challenges facing the novel in the contemporary world. It will seek to contextualize the novel by reference to other genres and other media, and in relation to its changing social and historical environments.

A key question to be addressed in the series is precisely how diversity affects the novel. We understand the concept of diversity to be a complex one, that incorporates but is not defined by any one question of location, racial or cultural identification, gendered and sexual diversity, ability, and class, which all motivate a revision of the theory of the novel form. At the same time, forms of diversity are subject to the prevailing and sometimes coercive norms that the novel across several centuries has both pressed against and forced into visibility.

We envisage publishing monographs of 60,000 – 90,00 words. Submissions to the series should comprise a proposal, two chapters of manuscript and a cv. In composing your proposal, please refer to the guide on this webpage.