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The epic and the novel, these two major forms of great epic literature, differ from one another not by their authors' fundamental intentions but by the given historico-philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. It would be superficial – a matter of mere artistic technicality – to look for the only and decisive genre-defining criterion in the question of whether a work is written in verse or prose.George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel (1914)
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The epic and the novel, these two major forms of great epic literature, differ from one another not by their authors' fundamental intentions but by the given historico-philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. It would be superficial – a matter of mere artistic technicality – to look for the only and decisive genre-defining criterion in the question of whether a work is written in verse or prose.George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel (1914)
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