All societies possess narrative traditions, myths, and legends about gods and heroes, often in verse. In literate as opposed to oral societies, prose narrative also seems to be an inevitable development, and in Western culture from Greek antiquity onwards there is a rich tradition of prose fictions that are called “novels” by some literary historians. But literary historians have also insisted that long prose narratives beginning in the early to mid-seventeenth century in Europe are radically distinct from their predecessors, and that they inaugurate a type of fiction peculiar to Western modernity that is by custom referred to as “the novel,” the form that expresses the special qualities of modern Western experience.

The most influential account of the modern novel is Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (1920). “The Novel,” he says, “is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” The novel reveals “that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that without meaning reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality.” For Lukács ancient epic and novel are polar opposites, with the novel dramatizing the distinctive nature of modern experience at its most problematic, especially when set against the epic that gave “form to a totality of life that is rounded from within” (60). Whereas the epic assumes that the world has form and significance, the novel is about a frustrated seeking for the meaningful coherence that epic takes for granted.