The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947

The novel-essay emerged in France, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and reached its highest formal complexity in Austria and Germany, during the interwar period. The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947 focuses on this literary genre and makes the case that is crucial for a renovated understanding of the history of the novel in modernity. Stefano Ercolino frames the emergence of the novel-essay within the ideological crisis that fell upon the epistemological and symbolic apparatus of modernity in the last decades of the nineteenth century and culminated following the disasters first of World War I and subsequently of World War II.