How Western Is the Novel?

I

In 1911, GK Chesterton published his narrative poem ‘Lepanto’. Once a reciter’s favourite as a party piece, it recounts in galloping, ballad-like verse the victory of the Catholic powers of the Holy League under Don John of Austria over the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Chesterton, already a champion of mainstream Christianity but not yet a Roman Catholic convert, imagines the sea-fight in Greek waters as a new Crusade. Don John’s triumph supposedly halted the spread of the Sultan’s power across the Mediterranean, as ‘the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships’. Long ago, a wise schoolteacher taught me never to swallow claims that any battle counted as ‘decisive’. So, it soon proved with Lepanto. Within a couple of years, Ottoman forces had retaken Cyprus and strengthened their grip right along the North African coast. Don John, ‘the last knight of Europe’, had caused barely a ripple on history’s surface.

Besides the corny rollicking splendour of its verse, the interest of ‘Lepanto’ lies elsewhere. Chesterton frames this rather ephemeral win for Western Christendom over a Muslim-ruled multi-faith empire as an epochal victory for free will over determinism. He imagines ‘Mahound’ – a conventional, often derogatory name for Prophet Muhammad in medieval Christian Europe – alarmed at the return of Crusader aggression: ‘The voice that shook our palaces – four hundred years ago./ It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;/ It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!’

In Chesterton’s reading, these notable Crusader warriors stand for autonomy of the will against the ‘Sultan’s smile’ of acceptance and submission. This, of course, has little to do with actual Islamic theology. Any monotheistic belief-system that posits both an all-knowing deity and human agency will spend much of its time wrangling over just this contradiction. Chesterton would have known next to nothing of the quarrels of Qadarites, Jabarites and Mu’tazilites over divine providence and individual choice that ran in parallel – at the same time, in the same terms – to bitter Christian theological disputes.

In ‘Lepanto’, the sting, and the jolt, comes in the tail. The battle’s most celebrated combatant was Miguel de Cervantes, the future author of Don Quixote, who suffered serious wounds on a ship in the service of Philip II of Spain. At the conflict’s end, Chesterton gives Cervantes a vision of ‘a straggling road in Spain,/ Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain’. Cervantes ‘smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade...’ In Edwardian England, as in many places now, it was axiomatic to treat Don Quixote (published in two parts in 1605 and 1615) as the foundational work of the modern European, or Western, novel. For Chesterton, the picaresque, digressive, freely-chosen adventures of the scrawny deluded knight and his pragmatic sidekick Sancho Panza had their germ in a mythic conquest of fate by will. In jest, or in earnest (perhaps both), literary history for him becomes a key annexe to the clash of civilisations.

How ‘Western’ is the modern novel? More entertaining than the scholars, Chesterton performs a similar manoeuvre when he ascribes not just the origins of the novel as we know it to Christian Europe, but its role as a story of discovery and self-realisation rooted in individual choice. A free agent who invents other free agents, the novelist smiles ‘not as Sultans smile’, for all that he lacks ‘Eastern’ rulers’ untrammelled power. However, one crucial aspect of Don Quixote rather complicates the notion that it inaugurated the novel as a European or ‘Western’ tale of freedom pursued, achieved or denied.

Commentators have puzzled for centuries over Cervantes’s presentation of his story as a translation from Arabic. The narrator tells us that he came across some Arabic pamphlets in the Toledo market-place and sought ‘a Spanish-speaking Morisco’ – that is, someone of Muslim descent, officially converted after the royal expulsion order on non-Christians in 1492 – to translate them for him. Arabic speakers still abound in Toledo, and one soon turns up. We learn that the entire ‘History of Don Quixote of La Mancha’ was actually written by ‘Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian’. The narrator alludes to this Sayyid Hamid, whose name also invokes the – in Spain – notoriously Muslim- or Jewish-coded aubergine (berenjena), throughout both parts of the narrative.

Cervantes spent five years as a captive in Algiers before he was ransomed in 1580; he would have spoken at least some Arabic. The conceit of an Arabic-language mock-author gives him plenty of scope for jokes. It also plants the world of Don Quixote in the soil of a Spain that, despite Inquisition and persecution, had still not lost its pluralistic roots. It turns out that the novel as prose epic of freedom against fate starts life as a self-consciously hybrid growth that salutes its kinship with a wider tribe of story-forms.

In recent decades, the long-embedded notion of large-scale prose fiction as a signature creation of European, or Western, cultures has come under sustained scrutiny. Cervantes’ own fabrication of his ‘Cide Hamete’ as guiding spirit for the escapades of the Don and Sancho nods to the presence of a broader pool of narratives available to any writer of the age. Contemporary accounts of the novel now dive much deeper in time, and stretch much further in space. In most parts of the world, poetry – epic or lyric – prevailed as the supreme verbal art, whether spoken or recorded via a written script. Prose stories, let alone manuscript and print versions of them, count unarguably as a cadet branch of literature. They can nonetheless boast a history that covers more than two millennia.

In Europe itself, and around Mediterranean shores, popular prose romances delighted the Greek and Roman worlds in the early centuries of the Common Era. Works such as Chariton’s Chaireas and Kallirrhoé, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe circulated widely across the Roman Empire and beyond. In Sanskrit, Banabhatta composed stylistically elaborate prose epics of love and war, most prominently his Kadambari, at the court of the Buddhist emperor Harsha in northern India in the seventh century. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the canonical ‘classic novels’ of China – from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West to The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Dream of the Red Chamber – span almost every kind of storytelling mode practised in Western fiction. Even parochially-minded historians of Western literature have long acknowledged that Lady Shikibu Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji (completed by 1020) had, in Heian-era Japan, perfected the fictional art of psychological inwardness.

Besides, even as the modern novel took wing in England, one of its heartlands, it competed with vigorous rivals. Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe – that archetypal pseudo-documentary novel of an adventurer in search of fulfilment through ordeal – in 1719. At that moment, the bestselling fictions distributed by London printers were editions of the so-called ‘Grub Street’ translations of the Thousand and One Nights. Antoine Galland’s French versions of the Arabic, Persian and Indian folk-tales told to him by his Syrian informant, Hanna Diyab, began to appear in English translation in 1706. (Diyab had embellished the corpus with some celebrated items, such as the story of Aladdin, that feature in no Arabic manuscript.) By 1711, the Earl of Shaftesbury noted that a ‘Moorish fancy... prevails strongly at the present time’. From 1723, the London News began to serialise the Arabian Nights Entertainments (the usual English title) – in 445 instalments! Just as realistic, individualist, will-driven novels of personal endeavour allegedly start to conquer the English, and European, literary scene, most readers are relishing fantastic ‘Oriental’ yarns of magic and marvels. That love endured, and endures – often as a conscious counterpoint to what came to be defined as the ‘Western canon’. In 1789, the taste-making author Horace Walpole advises a correspondent to ‘Read Sinbad the Sailor’s voyages, and you will be sick of Aeneas’s’ (in Virgil’s Aeneid).

II

Any global perspective – or simply a deeper dig into the European past – makes the debunking of Chesterton’s implied proposition an elementary task. Cervantes himself knows full well that he is not devising adventures of the free, sovereign individual in a vacuum, but plucking the diverse fruits of storytelling skills from an orchard grown by many hands. Yet the idea of the novel as a special cultivation of Europe or ‘the West’ has proved stubborn and persistent – for reasons that warrant some attention.

Of course, not every prose story constitutes a novel as most readers now understand it. The Thousand and One Nights (considered mainly as low-status folklore in Arab societies) had a vast and lasting impact on Western narrative art, but as material rather than method. Cervantes himself stands on the threshold between loose, shaggy traditional yarn-spinning, often known as the romance, and the close inspection of character, motive and aspiration now associated with the novel. An essay by Salman Rushdie celebrates the time-honoured ‘wonder tale’ – like the Nights, or even much of Don Quixote – and its contribution to the ‘antic, ludic, comic, eccentric’ strand in fiction, but still with the assumption that novel’s main current moved down another channel.

That channel, if you follow influential studies such as Ian Watt’s 1957 work The Rise of the Novel, gave a privileged place to ‘formal realism’ – verisimilitude of both social background and human character – and reflected the rising confidence of a broad middle-class, often female, readership. Robust networks of printing, publishing and distribution put stories cheaply in the hands of readers empowered by rising rates of literacy, commercial prosperity, and a weakening of religious orthodoxy and conformism. The novel in this familiar (bourgeois, ‘Western’) paradigm above all told stories about freedom – social, professional, erotic, later political – to people who wanted more of it.

That freedom might be chased with an explorer’s, even a coloniser’s zeal (as with Robinson Crusoe himself) or thwarted, as by the conniving rakes who deceive love-struck heroines in Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela. But this template reliably places an individual dream of self-realisation at the core of the renewed art of fiction. For male heroes, often of insecure or marginal origins, that generally means making one’s own way in a world of obstacles and opportunities: the Bildungsroman honed in landmark works such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship from 1795. For women, still largely excluded from education and careers, it entailed the struggle for autonomy in private life and, above all, in marriage-partner choice – as in the entirety of Jane Austen’s work.

The philosopher Georg Lukacs, at this point still a Hegelian rather than a Marxist, made a masterly, if simplistic, sketch of the form’s development in his 1920 Theory of the Novel. For Lukacs, the novel ‘is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God’ but occupied by bourgeois capitalism. In these God-forsaken times, ‘the novel tells of the adventure of interiority’ and recounts ‘the story of the soul that goes to find itself’. In the absence of a lost ‘totality’, the novel’s protagonists – its Quixotes and Sanchos – ride out in search of the meaning hidden somewhere in a newly-disenchanted world.

As for George Orwell, in his 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’, he put one popular spin on this paradigm in memorably pithy terms: ‘The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual.’ For Orwell, no obedient Communist or Catholic could create a good novel because such works ‘are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy’. Fiction that matters demands not simply public freedom of speech, but private freedom from fear: ‘Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.’

This model of the novel’s development assumes that authority – in the family, the state, the church – has become open to every kind of question. Scepticism joins individualism and the quest for an authentic self at the heart of the novelistic mission. In some readings, this essential doubt hallmarks the European, or Western, art of fiction. A classic expression of this cluster of beliefs comes in Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel. Kundera writes, in the early 1980s, as a Czech still under the Soviet yoke: his Europe and its culture stands in opposition not so much to other continents but to his idea of totalitarian barbarism. For Kundera, ‘The novel is Europe’s creation; its discoveries... belong to the whole of Europe’. First it celebrated adventures in ‘a space without frontiers’ and then, in the heyday of psychological realism, ‘the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual’. Ever the ironist, he calls this ‘one of Europe’s finest illusions’.

Powered by laughter, averse to dogma, the novel represents for Kundera ‘the imaginary paradise of individuals’; that territory ‘where no one possesses the truth’ but where ‘everyone has the right to be understood’. Doubt must fuel its flourishing, because ‘the art inspired by God’s laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them’. To Kundera, this literary Utopia has a specific geography, and a history: ‘That imaginative realm of tolerance was born with modern Europe, it is the very image of Europe – or at least our dream of Europe’. If Europe’s culture is now ‘under threat’, then ‘that precious essence of the European spirit is being held safe as in a treasure- chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel’.

The Cold War – with Soviet domination on one hand, American materialism on the other – conditioned Kundera’s militantly Eurocentric perspective. Since he wrote, however, the critical winds have swung into another quarter. Just as the ‘West’ as a historical or ideological concept has been fragmented or dismantled (as, typically, in Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s The West: a new history of an old idea), so the novel and its evolution has migrated far from its reputed modern, post-medieval, and Western European roots. Critics and historians now seek to knock down artificial barriers erected between ‘Western’ fiction that trailed in the footsteps, or hoofprints, of Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe, and the older, deeper, implicitly more global, types of storytelling in prose.

Perhaps the finest of these revisionist accounts came in the classicist Margaret Anne Doody’s 1996 study of ancient Greek and Latin fiction, The True Story of the Novel. To Doody, ‘Romance and the Novel are one. The separation between them is part of a problem, not part of a solution.’ Look at the stories told by classical prose authors in the first centuries of the Common Era, many of them anonymous, and you will see that the novel in the West ‘has a continuous history of about two thousand years’. Doody does still invoke the ‘West’, but chiefly as a manoeuvre to show how open these authors were to swirling cross-currents of narrative all around the Mediterranean and beyond. The stories of Syria and Egypt, for instance, help to seed ‘the matrix of the Western novel’.

She advocates an ecumenical, wide-screen history of the novel that long predates a narrow narrative that stems from Defoe, Richardson, or Cervantes. And this more inclusive story did not hatch in modern universities. In 1640, the French Protestant scholar Salmasius prefaced his edition of the Greek tale Kleitophon and Leukippé by Achilles Tatius (composed around 150) with an essay that traces the genealogy of the novel back first to Persia, then to the Arabs, then to Spain, and so to the rest of the ‘West’. As Doody glosses his argument, the novel ‘is thus a truly Eastern form of literature, to which all Europeans are to some extent latecomers’. It seems entirely apt that my edition of The True Story of the Novel carries a cover endorsement from Martin Bernal, whose still-controversial Black Athena argued for the African origins of classical Greek culture.

So, should we simply dump the notion – espoused in different accents by Chesterton and Orwell, Lukacs and Kundera – of the novel as a ‘Western’, or European, epic of free will, interior life and personal autonomy? For sure, as a culturally-specific origin myth, it makes little sense. No one could read The Tale of Genji or The Dream of the Red Chamber and seriously conclude that (say) Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf exposed secrets of the human heart unknown to mighty literary minds in Heian Japan or Qing-dynasty China. For a contemporary wide-scale account of global storytelling such as Alexander Beecroft’s An Ecology of World Literature, global literary practices may develop in parallel, within ‘biomes’ determined by language, geography and power. Genres can thrive independently, in different climates, without the need to seek a single root-stock. This ecological approach to creativity avoids the ‘diffusionist’ hunt for sources and influences that still steers a lot of cultural history. In fiction, as in other arts, a hundred flowers – not necessarily offshoots of one another – may separately bloom around the globe.

III

I would argue, however, that there is still a case for considering the arrival of the modern novel in some cultures as the advent of a way of writing and reading that does have a European or even ‘Western’ dimension. Contact, commerce and conquest all play a part in this process. In much of the Middle East and South Asia, prose fiction in its modern forms settles in the nineteenth century as a latecomer, and a fairly lowly one at that. In cultures that hallowed poetry of all kinds, and respected philosophy, history and religious writing, secular, vernacular stories about the romantic, familial, and vocational life of ordinary individuals land with both the kudos (to some) and the taint (to others) of the ‘West’. Their acclimatisation called for institutions that fostered translation from European languages, schools and colleges founded by colonial powers, evangelical missions (especially Protestant ones), newspapers and printing presses. From Morocco to Bengal, the novel as we mostly know it arrived in the steamer-trunks of colonial modernity.

To say so implies no value judgment about the more venerable kinds of storytelling with which this newcomer vied – from the picaresque Arabic tales of the maqama tradition (which probably underlie Don Quixote) to the endless popular iterations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics across southern Asia. Yet when, in the Middle East or British India, writers chose the upstart form of the novel, they did so in the knowledge that it still carried some heavy European, or Western, baggage. In Urdu, for instance, the pioneering Lucknow author Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar drew on Cervantes and Dickens as well as Persian narrative verse when, in the late 1870s, he sent his picaresque hero from Lucknow to Ottoman and Afghan wars in Fasana-e-Azad. Significantly, the adventures of Azad and his Sancho-like sidekick Khoji began as a newspaper serial: a platform common to East and West alike over much of the modern history of fiction. Another of Sarshar’s novels, Khudai Faujdar, more or less translates parts of Don Quixote.

In the context of empire and its schools, missions and newspapers, the novel as imported form offered a toolbox packed with powerful implements. They could cut in many ways. Its fables of quest, discovery, and self-assertion might threaten tradition and authority. Some writers might embrace the form for that reason, and others shun it. Quite often, early-adopters of the novel in its modernised ‘Western’ configuration seem to face in different directions. For a prime example, let’s go to Ottoman Syria (which then incorporated Lebanon). 

This year (2026), the Oxford World’s Classics imprint has published the first ever English translation of Sa’iba, a story written in Arabic in 1891 by Alis al-Bustani. Published in Beirut, where she and her family of educators and publishers lived, it belongs to the early dawn of the modern Arabic novel, and ranks as one of the first published prose fictions by an Arab woman. Its presence on the Oxford list, in a fine translation by Marilyn Booth, itself bears witness to the Western institutional push over recent years both to globalise, and feminise, the historical canons of literature.

Alis’s father Butrus and her male siblings were themselves prolific authors; she probably contributed to the major Arabic encyclopaedia, Da’irat al-ma’arif, that became a kind of household enterprise. The polyglot Butrus’s literary translations included an Arabic version of Robinson Crusoe in 1861. Originally Maronite Christians from Mount Lebanon, the al-Bustanis worked with American missionaries and later helped to found evangelical Protestant congregations in Beirut. In some places, Orwell’s seemingly rash and parochial claim about the ‘Protestant’ nature of the novel does seem to have purchase. In Bengal, for instance, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 1865 Durgeshnandini is often cited as the first major modern novel in vernacular Bengali – but it was preceded, in 1852, by a didactic story by a missionary, Hana Catherine Mullens.

Alis may have been an Arab Protestant from Beirut (she later moved with her husband to Cairo). She was also, as an Ottoman Syrian, a loyal subject of the reforming Sultan Abdulhamid II in Istanbul. Sa’iba opens with a flowery dedication to the ruler, written in Turkish, which lauds him for the promotion of female education and its benefits for ‘the community of women’. Like women authors in Jane Austen’s time and earlier, Alis aims to establish both her own respectability, and that of the literary genre she practises. Female writers may also be solid citizens of the empire. Indeed, Alis al-Bustani, as a Christian Arab, sets her story in Istanbul amid upper-middle-class Turks whom we assume to be Muslims – although her religious discussion goes no further than routine praise of the divine virtues of charity, piety and fidelity that no denomination would object to.

Sa’iba as a narrative looks both backwards and forwards – if you like, both ‘East’ and ‘West’ at the same time. The heroine embodies the virtue of her name: ‘Verity’, as an eighteenth-century novelist might have rendered it. But the plot turns on the free choice of marriage partner, and its consequences: the primary motor of so much fiction by and about women. Sa’iba and her wealthy cousin Farid are both ‘clever, quick-witted and handsome’ (al-Bustani, in Marilyn Booth’s voice, can sound distinctly Austen-esque). Nonetheless, she resists betrothal to this eminently eligible cousin – the obvious, traditional option – in favour of the serious, aspirational Lutfi. A career military officer, Lutfi represents that inner-directed quest for recognition in the public world that drives the archetypal male heroes of the novel in its modern incarnation. To the pleasure-seeking playboy Farid, that makes the dutiful, bourgeois swot ‘as boring and lifeless as the hump of a camel’.

Yet the pair wed: Sa’iba’s feminine virtues include the exercise of free choice that commands respect. However, the thwarted Farid – chancer, wastrel, gambler – sets out to ensnare the woman he has lost with ruses that will make Lutfi doubt her chastity. Contrived assignations in sinister hunting lodges (shades of the Gothic novel), poison-pen letters, traps laid by wily Greek servants: Farid’s Iago-like intrigues to ruin Sa’iba’s reputation and alienate her from Lutfi mix traditional tropes from storytelling both in Europe and beyond. Marjana, the jariya (probably a manumitted former slave) who assists Farid in his dirty tricks, carries a name out of the Thousand and One Nights.

Al-Bustani’s passages of psychological scrutiny belong to an altogether different age. We see Lutfi tormented by his inner rift between love and jealousy, ‘torn between scepticism and persuasion’ by Farid’s fabrications. He becomes ‘a lost man wandering through unknown parts’, while Sa’iba herself reaches the point of contemplating suicide in her despair at the false accusations. Even Sa’iba’s ‘milk-sister’ Soraya – the time-honoured role of a female confidante – undergoes a modern anguish of her own when she secretly falls for Lutfi herself. Soraya experiences a vivid ‘internal battle’ between ‘her heart’s natural inclinations and the obligations of sympathy and propriety’.

A far-flung adventure resolves the plot, though one of a contemporary kind. The stricken Lutfi transfers to the imperial police and travels to impose order on the lawless Macedonian badlands outside Salonica. With a hired band of brigands, Farid schemes to eliminate his rival but, after a shoot-out, has all his plots exposed. However, he flees the scene of the crime and plans his ultimate vengeance... Thus a book that opens in an Ottoman equivalent of Austen-land closes in a flurry of melodramatic upsets that recall Alexandre Dumas – but always with the flavours of traditional Arabic storytelling at work somewhere in the recipe. One of Farid’s problems, we learn, is his infatuation ‘with tales of chivalry and romance’ that have turned his head and loosened his hold on truth. Cervantes gives exactly that cause for Quixote’s detachment from sense and reason. Sa’iba herself, in contrast, deploys the free will of a virtuous woman who grasps and bows to social realities: she insists on marital choice, but never otherwise rebels.

IV

For al-Bustani, fiction does tell a story of freedom – although one curtailed by the constraints of place, time, and custom. The institutions of modernity, from literacy and education for girls to printed journals and publishing houses, allowed that story to be spread. Although there might be nothing intrinsically ‘Western’ in the nature of the heroine’s experience or the form of its narration, it took a long series of encounters – not clashes – between cultures for Sa’iba as a published novel to exist. The forces of learning, commerce, religion, and empire – in this case, one whose headquarters lay to the north, not the west – all had to coalesce in order to generate her tale of integrity preserved.

Cosmopolitan, multi-focal, literary history now deprecates the idea of a ‘Western’ lineage for the novel as fervently as once it endorsed it. Margaret Anne Doody, far more eloquent than most critics, reminds us that ‘the stockpot of stories nourishing to our sense of individual value and our hope for the future was simmering long ago in the “Far East” (as Westerners call it) and not only in Egypt or Syria’. No open-minded reader of fiction could dispute her injunction: ‘Let no one hope to have a tribally and culturally “pure” novel. The Novel is always a mongrel mixture.’ Look, however, at the modern form’s development in Asia or the Middle East, and that innate hybridity does seem to be inflected by the institutions and technologies of what was then ‘Western’ – and rapidly became global – modernity. For the al-Bustanis in Beirut, for Sarshar in Lucknow or Chatterjee in Kolkata, their many-sourced stories of love, quest and choice depend on presses and colleges, telegraphs and railways, to find the vehicles and recipients they need.

As it migrates and mutates across the world, the novel may indeed serve as a prose epic of freely-choosing individual subjects in a disenchanted world. But that world is seldom as open or free as the dreams of heroes and heroines who seek their own path through it. In Bengali, one of the writers who best dramatised fiction’s dialogue between choice and circumstance, liberty and obligation, was Rabindranath Tagore. His landmark 1916 novel Home and the World sets a classic love-triangle – upright husband, charismatic rival, divided, questing wife – against the public strife both between classes in Bengal, and between Indian nationalists and the British Raj. The will and choice that fiction nurtures lies within his characters’ reach, but comes at a steep cost, personal and social. ‘Why does God make us such mixed beings?’ the emotionally torn Bimala wonders, while her suitor – the nationalist militant Sandip – is a Nietzschean demagogue shaped by ‘Western’ ideas. He takes free will to extremes and believes that the ego’s drive of ‘I want’ is ‘the core chant of creation’. Caught between past and future, duty and desire, Tagore’s protagonists are exemplary ‘mixed beings’. They must learn to navigate a scrambled society in the setting of a thoroughly hybrid literary form: the modern novel. 

Tagore the political thinker had much to say about the perpetual dialectic of East and West. In his lectures on nationalism, he contrasts his conception of the ‘spirit of the West’ – plural, rational, tolerant, enlightened – against ‘the nation of the West’ that sought and held authority by force and fraud, as in colonial India. The West as he imagined it had bound its ‘banner of freedom’ in the ‘iron chains of organisation’. Those ‘iron chains’ of institutional power had their uses, however. Technologies of culture and bureaucracies of education allowed fictional stories of the pursuit of freedom and fulfilment, such as Alis al-Bustani’s, to spread their wings from the domestic into the public realm.

As a parable of Western creativity, Chesterton’s image of the free- spirited novelist who spurns the ‘Sultan’s smile’ of destiny makes sense only as a myth. The house of fiction has many global mansions; characters and authors cherish their freedom in a lot of them. Give credence to the model of an essentially Western, European, or even Protestant novel, and (in Doody’s words) you end up ‘shutting out half of the prose fiction of the world’. Cases such as the al-Bustanis indicate that Western-accented transmission belts – from girls’ schoolrooms to steam-presses – did in many regions give the renewed form a dynamism vital to its growth. But then the novel loves to borrow, or steal, from everywhere and everything in what Doody calls its ‘stories of mixture and variety, of boundary-crossing and changing’. As readers know, novels of assorted times and climes tell tales of bastards and foundlings (such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones), tricksters and shape-shifters of dubious ancestry. As with its favourite motifs, so with the form.

Origins matter less than actions. Performance trumps inheritance. This promiscuous and miscegenated mode, ‘the hangout of slaves and lowlifes… of people down on their luck or stuck in a strange environment’, has a fascinating family tree, but tends both to confuse and escape it. Wherever it comes from, East or West, the next story always beckons. For Doody, ‘the Novel is not “pure” and refuses ever to pretend to be so. It rejoices in a rich muddy messiness that is the ultimate despair of Fascismus.’

References

GK Chesterton’s “Lepanto” can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org. Among the many English translations of Don Quixote, pride of place now goes to Edith Grossman’s, from 2003 (Vintage Classics). The most complete modern English edition of the Thousand and One Nights is Malcolm and Ursula Lyons’s translation (Penguin Classics). Newcomers to the cycle will find an indispensable guide in Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nights: a Companion (Barbara Ward, 2012). Peter L Caracciolo edited The Arabian Nights in English Literature (Macmillan, 1988). For a taste of the European novel in classical times, Penguin Classics has an edition of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, translated by PG Walsh. Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, under the title of The Story of the Stone, appears in Penguin Classics in the excellent recent translationby John Minford and David Hawkes, and Shikibu Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji in the same list, translated by Royall Tyler.

Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel was most recently re-published by University of California Press in 2001. Salman Rushdie’s discussion of the “wonder tale” comes in Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020 (Vintage, 2023). Georg Lukacs’s The Theory of the Novel is published, in Anna Bostock’s translation, by The Merlin Press (2006); Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, translated by Linda Asher, by Faber & Faber (1988), while George Orwell’s “Inside The Whale” appears, among several editions, in the Everyman’s Library selection of Orwell’s Essays (2002).

On historical and contemporary formulations of the idea of the West, its critics and its defenders, see Naoíse Mac Sweeney, The West, A New History of an Old Idea (WH Allen, 2023), but also Georgios Varouxakis, The West: the History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2025). Margaret Anne Doody’s The True Story of the Novel was published by HarperCollins in 1997, and Alexander Beecroft’s An Ecology of World Literature by Verso in 2015. Translated and introduced by Marilyn Booth, Sa’iba by Alis al-Bustani is in Oxford World’s Classics (2026). Roger Allen (ed.), The Arabic Novel: an historical and critical introduction (Syracuse University Press, 1995) surveys its context. Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World, translated by Sreejata Guha, is published by Penguin Classics India (2005), and Tagore’s essays on Nationalism in the Penguin Great Ideas series (2010).