Robert Clark Young - The Death of The Death of The Novel

The Death of The Death of The Novel

In 2008, Young published an essay, The Death of the Death of the Novel, in the Southern Review. Young’s thesis is that all arguments postulating the death of the novel are fallacious. Young goes back through literary history to show that F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Barth, Roland Barthes, Norman Mailer, Ambrose Bierce and others were incorrect when they claimed, at various times, that the literary novel was dead. Not only did literary novels continue to be published long after these writers announced the death of the novel, but many of the same writers, including Barth and Mailer, continued to publish literary novels—often to great acclaim—decades after arguing that continuing to do so was impossible.

Young also argues that new technologies such as radio, silent movies, talking movies, television, and the Internet have failed to destroy the novel, a genre which today enjoys higher sales than ever. With the advent of each of these new technologies, literary pessimists declared the death of the novel, and were wrong each and every time.

In making his arguments for the indestructibility of literature, Young reaches even further back in literary history, discussing the financial struggles of Johannes Gutenberg, the creative joy of ancient Egyptian scribes, and the panic among Sumerian writers when clay tablets were replaced by the new technology of papyrus.