About this Elements Series:

The Elements in the Novel series emphasizes the novel’s flexibility, putting the novel’s formal elements in dialogue with its enabling historical conditions and varied instantiations and anchoring these concepts both in specific texts and in that foundational skill of our discipline: close-reading. At the same time, contributors will consider the limits of the novel as form, given its genealogy and differential histories across the globe. The aim of the series is not to re-hash over-familiar concepts. Rather it intends to put critical concepts into conversation with one another to provide fresh thinking on some of the hallmarks of novel studies. If novels are able travel from their places of origins, what are the mechanisms of translation and circulation that enable this movement? What forms of literature does the novel encounter as it travels around the globe? How does the novel’s form adapt to the new circumstances in which it finds itself? By asking these questions, Elements in the Novel will produce new readings of canonical novels, introduce readers to novels or literary traditions with which they may not be familiar and offer a re-examination of both the story of the novel’s rise and of its defining formal features.