The Novel

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the development and the future of the novel. D.H. Lawrence was proud of his job, he said: “I am a man, and alive…for this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog”. Fiction pours from the presses and in number of titles, this must be the most prolific of novel-producing ages. But are they as good as in the golden age, or the silver, or the bronze, or the steam age? And do they signify? Is technology marginalising the novel or is it still the greatest way of telling a story?Despite many premature declarations of its demise, (stretching back almost to the date of its birth), the novel has been ‘getting the whole hog’ for hundreds of years. But what makes a novel different from other literature, and can we expect it to be still around, ‘getting the whole hog’ into the next century?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• D J Taylor No other episodes
  
• Gillian Beer No other episodes
  King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Cambridge University

Related episodes

• The Epic
  
  6 Feb, 2003 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Literary Modernism
  
  26 Apr, 2001 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Tolstoy
  
  25 Apr, 2002 890 Other literatures
• Masculinity in Literature
  
  20 Jan, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures
• Epistolary Literature
  
  15 Mar, 2007 820 English and Old English literatures
• Truth, Lies and Fiction
  
  15 Jul, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Biography
  
  22 Jun, 2000 920 Biography and genealogy
• Victorian Realism
  
  14 Nov, 2002 820 English and Old English literatures
• Progress
  
  18 Nov, 1999 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Proust
  
  17 Apr, 2003 840 French and related literatures

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p005463z

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005463z

Auto-category: 809.3 (History, description, critical appraisal of fiction)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. D H Lawrence was unashamedly proud of what he did.