Paige, Nicholas D / Escritor
"Technologies of the Novel offers the first quantitative history of the novel's development over the course of over two centuries in France and England. As such, it breaks with the common practice of using select works to tell a story about the genre's rise from infancy to adulthood. Instead, via a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 novels, it traces the incubation, development, and subsequent abandonment of a variety of formal devices - the epistolary format or the use of inset narratives, for example, and also the much-remarked propensity of early novelists to pretend they were presenting true stories. The common shorthand of "the novel," then, designates not a single changing thing, but an evolving system, composed of competing artifacts which themselves evolve. These multiple and overlapping changes do not add up to a "story"; nor do they map onto extra-literary developments (e.g., the Scientific Revolution, Capitalism). Instead, this study argues that literary evolution is both patterned and highly contingent, and needs to be understood with the tools developed by historians of technology"-
