The Theory of the Novel [Paperback]

Georg Lukacs (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262620278 | ISBN-13: 978-0262620277 | Publication Date: January 15, 1974

Georg Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1914-1915, a period that also saw the conception of Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Letters, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Spengler's Decline of the West, and Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia. Like many of Lukács's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukács's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The first English translation of Lukács's early theoretical work on the novel. It begins with a comparison of the historical conditions that gave rise to the epic and the novel. In the age of the novel the once known unity between man and his world has been lost, and the hero has become an estranged seeker of the meaning of existence. Later, Lukács offers a typology of the novel based on whether the hero struggles for the realization of a meaningful idea, or withdraws from all action. The balance of these extremes forms the third possibility, and each type is exemplified. The book is not a study of artistic technicalities, but of man, history, and art tied closely in their development. It is written in a moving, lyrical style well rendered by the translation." Library Journal

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (January 15, 1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262620278
• ISBN-13: 978-0262620277
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #148,172 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The epic and the novel, April 21, 2000

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Ramon Guillermo - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Theory of the Novel (Paperback)

The "Theory of the Novel" (1916) is the major work of Lukacs' pre-Marxist period. It is extremely useful both as a kind of document of the feverish intellectual atmosphere of pre-WW I Europe and as one of the underground classics (together with his "History and Class Consciousness" (1923)) that influenced what was later to become the Western Marxism of the Frankfurt School. Lukacs' pre-Marxist prose style, comparable to that of his friend Ernst Bloch's, may seem excessively romantic at times but the overall effect is that theory seems to come alive as the expression of a living human being undergoing an intense personal crisis. The first part of the book discusses the rise of the crisis of interpretation that is represented by the novel as a literary form when it is placed in contrast to the fullness of meaning perceivable in the earlier epic, the form which the novel presumably replaced. Lukacs' discussion of the fundamental dichotomy tearing apart at European civilization from within parallels kindred works such as Nietszches' "The Birth of Tragedy" (with its Apollonian/Dionysian schema) and Toennies' classic work of sociology "Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft." Also instructive to the student of literature would be a comparison of Lukacs' model with that of Auerbach's "Mimesis" and Bakhtin's contrast of the epic and the novel. The second part of this book is an application of this binaristic framework to novels by Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Goethe, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. While this whole second part is incredibly rich in insights, Lukacs' application of the Bergsonian notion of time as duree to his study of Flaubert's "L'Education sentimentale" is particularly unforgettable. There, he writes: "Time is the resistance of the organic."

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars German Romanticism melds into Western Marxism, May 28, 2001

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C. E. R. Mendonça "Carlos Eduardo Rebello de ... (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Theory of the Novel (Paperback)

In this pre-marxist work of the Young Lukács, he takes advantege of the German Romantic myth of the Homeric epic as the hallmark of a supposedly "unalienated" civilization, where the individual was his envinronment and had no need to develop the kind of alienated, subjective self-consciousness we find in the bourgeois XIXth Century novel. Of course this is a modern myth, based on a very selective reading of Homer's epic - which already betrayed a clear consciousness of the divide existing between the Human and the Divine, as well as of a further divide between the mythical Heroic age and the everyday realities of an archaic class society. Neverthless, this modern myth came to form the core of Lukács' lifelong research programme - the study of alienation, which came to form much of the best research of Western Marxism (after reading Lukács'work one can not imagine Adorno and Horkheimer's _Dialectic of the Enlightnment_ being written without Lukács' starting stone). A must-read, therefore, for anyone interested in Western Marxism in general, as well as Lukács and the Frankfurt School in particular.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A conveniently short, even if out-dated, piece of literary theory, June 3, 2009

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Salty Saltillo (from the road, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Theory of the Novel (Paperback)

It is a rare book that begins with an author's preface repudiating everything in the book and urging the reader to reject the book's message "root and branch." But then again, this is Lukacs, the man who once lived in under and defended enthusiastically Stalin's Soviet Union, the man who, although involved in the Nagy government of 1956 Hungary, publicly abandoned his earlier views, engaged in self-criticism and ratted out his former colleagues in order to ensure a place for himself in the post-1956 Hungarian communist party, even as his former colleagues were either executed or fled to the West.

That said, unless you are an enthusiastic devotee of western Marxism, the repudiation preface will seem somewhat unpersuasive. Lukacs' primary criticism of his prior self is the over-emphasis placed on a single criterion by which to distinguish novels, which criterion leads to an incomplete reading of such novels (there is more to the novels than can be summed up by application of the criterion). Lukacs has several other criticisms, generally of the kind one would expect to be made of a Marxist materialist against any argument built on Hegelian and Weberian premises. The Theory of the Novel presents a somewhat troubling argument, but Lukacs' reasons for rejecting the book do not entirely reflect my own concerns.

Chapter one of the book sets forth a historicentric framework of analysis that attempts to organize "ages" or "civilizations" of mankind based on the binary difference between integration and non-integration. Evidentiary basis for the analytical framework is found in Greek and medieval classics - the epics of Homer, the tragedies of the Greek dramatists, and the philosophical schools of ancient Greece, and the writings of Dante and St. Thomas, among others. This is a decisively early 19th century German idealist (and Hegelian) influence at work in Lukacs' thinking and is presumably the sort of intellectual move Lukacs in the preface is rejecting when he describes his flawed method as involving the formation of a general synthetic concept based on a few characteristics of a particular period, then analyzing individual phenomena from the generalizations that supposedly constitute a comprehensive overall view. What I find objectionable in this framework is the idea that "ages" or "civilizations" are characterized by a binary conceptual distinction as abstract and ambiguous as "integration". There is an interesting intellectual exercise (loose and fuzzy as it may be) to be had in contemplating the degree to which an individual "soul" (Lukacs' term) is "integrated" or not. (To be integrated appears to mean that one's sense of reality is an inclusive one that is not subject to revision or challenge; as a result, all experience is given a place within your sense of total reality and your actions are all taken and given meaning based on this stable sense of what is real, valuable, right and wrong; the opposite is the sense in which there is a chasm between what we aspire to and the sense of reality that is at our disposal). But it seems silly to then attempt to impose such a binary dichotomy onto civilizations and ages, especially with such shallow evidence as the scrapes of literature which we have inherited from Greece. Further, it seems to me that the "integration" - "non-integration" dichotomy that Lukacs sets forth (to the extent that it can be made plausible at all as a means of evaluating character) is more accurately a continuum of degrees, not a dramatic duality. Only the superhumans and fools approach experience anything remotely like a self awareness of feeling "integrated" in Lukacs' sense. The rest of us are condemned to greater and lesser degrees to experience a gap separating what we experience and what we expect, subverting our notions of the "way life is" even as we attempt to navigate through life. But isn't that precisely why we find novels so interesting in the first place? And isn't this the young Lukacs' over-arching point: that the novel (or at least, some novels) effectively illustrates that "non-integration" that is so characteristic of our experiences as human beings?