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The novel-essay emerged in France, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and reached its highest formal complexity in Austria and Germany, during the interwar period. Here, Ercolino argues that it is crucial for a renovated understating of the history of the novel in modernity. "Stefano Ercolino's book is a splendid rediscovery of one of the most important modern narrative genres, the novel-essay. By showing how the various authors of novel-essays - J.-K. Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Hermann Broch - propose a wide range of syntheses between thought and action, Ercolino's book offers a nuanced, innovative, and memorable view of modernity itself." - Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in French and Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, USA and author of The Lives of the Novel 'The daring hypothesis of Ercolino's study - which ranges over a half century of literary history, over a half-dozen writers of the likes of Musil, Dostoevsky, Mann, and Huysmans, and over the insights of even more numerous literary theorists - is that the hybrid aesthetics of the novel-essay does not merely enact the symbolic crisis of modernist thinking; it also furnishes the most resounding intellectual reply.' - Thomas Harrison, Professor of Italian, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
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