Civilizatia romanului

About this book

The Civilization of the Novel is a wide-ranging history of the growth of the novel as a generic structure, a cultural horizon of expectations, and as a narrative mode of representing different civilizational projects and paradigms: Oriental (Ramayana, Gilgameš, The Book of the Dead, the myth of Zarathustra, the Arab epics, the early Zen initiation narratives) and Western (the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Odyssey, the Greek protonovels, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the medieval romances, the Renaissance picaresque, ending with Rabelais and Cervantes). From the very beginning, the book emphasizes the multiple origin of the novel, focusing on the civilizational impact of this supergenre that traverses many different cultures, marking their moment of maximum development. The book proves and demonstrates that the novel is the manifestation of the epic in a superior architecture, re-designing itself differently in terms of the various cultures and civilizations. In other words, an ‘epic architecture’ is a sophisticated narrative system, called ‘novel’ in our time and culture, but existing under different names in previous or alternate civilizations. Epic architectures were developed by past or alternate civilizations – the latter contemporaneous with our own – according to their forma mentis, language, aesthetic norms, philosophy, and religion. An epic architecture is an entity in itself not superimposed or being mistakenly assigned to the epic or epicism. Epic architectures are the most powerful aesthetic realities capable of carrying down in time the characteristic values of a world. Emerging at the height of a civilization, an epic architecture perpetuated its values beyond that civilization’s disappearance from the stage of History.