Abstract
Abstract: This essay proposes the thesis that the literary critical project launched by Walter Benjamin in his early work (from 1914 to 1922) opens an important and complex line of inquiry into the novel that has not been sufficiently appreciated—either in the reception of his work or with regard to the study of the novel more generally. Benjamin's early criticism does not contain a fully developed and comprehensive theory of the novel like the one offered by Georg Lukács during these same years. But Benjamin's approach to the novel in his early work, and in particular in the essay "Goethe's Elective Affinities," completed in 1922, marks a departure from an interpretation of the genre as a modern form of epic of which Lukács's theory is the most developed example.
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