Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading—and its power to consume and enchant—more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures.

Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? ...