Epilogue

The current notion of the “death of the novel” is a midcentury construction at once inherited from modernism and designed to obscure the novel’s affinity with new forms of moving image storytelling. Against this critical rubric, I suggest that contemporary literary history is already enmeshed in a history of evolving media—which is to say, an ongoing record of generic distress. There has not been only one death of the novel, stretched out over a century from modernism to the present; for the “death of the novel” is not a historical event. The literary history of the novel after film cannot be drawn in a straight line, in part because that history is not simply literary in nature. What has it meant for writers to discover that film and television may no longer be conceived as media foreign to the novel but are instead crucial pieces of its “hideous furniture”?