The novel and media: three essays

Abstract

These three short papers were initially formulated as contributions to a roundtable discussion on The Novel and Media held at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center in May 2018. Their brief was to contribute to the recent project of methodological reflection set in train by a resurgence of formalist analysis in literary criticism by thinking about the intersection of the novel form, novel theory, and media studies; at the most general level our challenge was to reflect upon the relation between the medium and the form of the literary text, and beyond that about the relation between the print medium in which the novel originated and the other media which form its environment and on which it frequently reflects.