Mikhail Bakhtin wrote almost a century ago that “the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes.”1 But even Bakhtin would have been surprised by some of the changes the novel has undergone in recent years. In the volume's final section of dealing with contemporary formations of the American novel, Robert Coover sees video games marching forth from the arcade and the ones and zeros of executable code spilling out from the computer to transform our sense of what literary narrative can do. DeNel Rehberg Sedo examines how mass media and the internet (as well as government-sponsored reading groups) have helped form new kinds of interactive reading communities; some of these are beginning to shape what gets published, how it gets marketed, and to whom. And Jan Baetens shows how even such a low-tech phenomenon as comics – the most sophisticated of which have been “knocking on literature's door” for decades – have now found an unlikely welcome in the house of the novel, in the process subtly eroding our baseline sense of the novel as “a narrative work of verbal fiction between two covers.”

Despite all of these changes, the novel's extraordinary powers of absorption and formal flexibility allow it to continue to perform its traditional function: to picture and reflect upon the broader transformations of the world surrounding it.