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London Review of Books

Into the Future subscriber-only content

David Trotter

  • The Novel: Vol. I: History, Geography and Culture edited by Franco Moretti  Buy this book
  • The Novel: Vol. II: Forms and Themes edited by Franco Moretti  Buy this book

What counts as a novel? Any ‘fictitious prose work’ over fifty thousand words was E.M. Forster’s answer, in Aspects of the Novel. It’s a broad enough definition, in all conscience, though it has begun to do some useful work by excluding a wide variety of short fiction in prose, and some long poems, such as Eugene Onegin or Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which are not quite prepared to admit to being long poems. But it may be too broad.

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David Trotter is a professor of English at Cambridge and the author of The English Novel in History, The Making of the Reader and, most recently, Cinema and Modernism.