The Homelessness of the Novel: Friedrich Blanckenburg and Novel Poetics

Abstract: Of all the major literary genres, the novel is the only one that has no poetics of its own and thus no given place in the canon of genres established in Antiquity. Formally speaking, the novel emerged as a homeless genre—a fact with which it has had to cope ever since the rise in popularity of romance during the Italian renaissance. How this homelessness is dealt with is however not an historical constant but undergoes substantial change throughout the history of the novel. One watershed moment in this history takes place in the eighteenth century during the so-called modernization of the novel. In this period, the formal homelessness of the novel goes from being a problem to be solved externally in poetological treatises—an attempt to give the novel a place within tradition après coup—to being a problem internal to the novel. The present essay considers how this fact forever changes what it means for the novel to have a form by turning to the eighteenth-century German writer and critic Friedrich Blanckenburg and his seminal work Essay on the Novel.