The Late Medieval Origins of the Modern Novel

Dramatically refreshing the age-old debate about the novel's origins and purpose, Kent traces the origin of the modern novel to a late medieval fascination with the wounded, and often eroticized, body of Christ. A wide range of texts help to illustrate this discovery, ranging from medieval 'Pietàs' to Thomas Hardy to contemporary literary theory.

The Late Medieval Origins of the Modern Novel dramatically refreshes the age-old debate regarding the novel''s origins and purpose. Acknowledging the excellence of Doody, Moore, and Pavel''s recent work, scholarship has yet to account for literature''s final ability, after millennia of engagement with royalty, heroes, epic journeys, morality tales, and political satire, to embrace the sexual, pained byways of the ordinary man and woman in the early modern period. Contrasting theories of the novel as a Protestant inheritance, this book ties the startling ontology and aesthetics of late medieval spirituality to the form''s scandalous, experimental early modern emergence. Recalling these origins, Kent reestablishes the novel theoretically as a landscape of vulnerable ''presence encounter'', and not primarily as a ''meaning event''. From James to Kundera to Robbe-Grillet, Kent engages literary theorists hinting at this primary ''presence'' purpose. She closes by exploring literary ''Pietàs'' within Hardy, Maupassant, and Bataille.