Inventing the Novel

This chapter offers a brief account of how Bakhtin conceived of the ancient novel in the 1930s, asking whether his work provides a proper theoretical underpinning for any historical approach to the genre and, given such an approach, how narrative evolved in antiquity. Although written some fifty years earlier, Bakhtin’s essays on ancient literary history were unavailable in English until collected and translated in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). Although not literally new, these essays are novel both to many students of fiction precisely because Bakhtin focuses his discussion on antiquity—the significance of which for the novel, he argues, has been “greatly underestimated”—and to classicists besides because these scholars are unlikely to know the studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais for which Bakhtin first became known in the West.