Exploding worlds

What is the twentieth-century novel? asks Edwin Frank in Stranger than Fiction. What it is not, he begins, is the nineteenth-century kind. This doesn’t mean he argues from a merely negative premise; rather, he’s attempting to wrest the discussion from certain warping assumptions. The very notion of periodisation by centuries – a ‘convenient, newly minted unit’, writes Frank, ‘larger than a lifetime, conformable to the memory of the nuclear family and designed to connect past to future in the developing narrative of human history’ – is itself a product of the nineteenth century.