Figure 1: A fragment from the panel “Pain of the Earth” by Volodymyr Priadka and Volodymyr Pasivenko (Vernadskyi National Scientific Library, Kyiv). Photo by Roman Malenkov.
This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.
Literary Value = The Value of the Novel
Natalya Bekhta[1]
The novel is the most valuable literary genre today, in a symbolic as well as in an economic sense. Guido Mazzoni has pithily defined the modern novel as “the genre in which one can tell absolutely any story in any way whatsoever” (2017, 16), highlighting the novel’s synonymity with narrative itself. The novel is also frequently synonymous with literature in general: Sarah Colvin’s (2025) examination of epistemic injustice in literature, to name one example among many, is structured as a reading of a set of prominent contemporary novels. Peter Boxall has also drawn attention to the novel’s “unique ability to put the relationship between art and matter, between words and the world, into a kind of motion” (2015, 13) that tries to make sense of the existing world and creates a vision for new ones. Speaking of worlds, Debjani Ganguly has offered a study of “this thing called the ‘world’” after 1989 and conducted it on the basis of one genre, the “Anglophone novel” (2016, 4) understood as a global phenomenon. Mark McGurl, finally, while recognizing that “the contemporary genre triad” also includes, in addition to the novel, epic and romance (2021, 27), still frames his study of “contemporary American fiction” (49) as a study of the novel in the age of Amazon.
In short, the novel—especially, its Anglo-American variant—acts as the key genre of contemporary literature and as a shorthand designation for the most versatile inquiries of literary and cultural theory today, which I take to be a strong sign of its symbolic value.[2] But the prevalent interest in studying literary and extra-literary phenomena on the basis of the novel is not merely a reflection of the international literary field, where the novel is a dominant aesthetic form and a favorite commodity. It is also a self-perpetuating process, where the current world-literary dominance of the novel dictates the topics and directions for theoretical inquiry, thus reinforcing this very dominance and the novel’s cultural prestige. Put differently, the novel conditions literary theory, literary critique, and readerly expectations to such an extent that other prose genres become invisible for theory and readership. Alternatively, these prose genres find themselves dismissed as failed novels and ‘genre fiction’, where the latter yet again reveals the novel’s special status above or outside the system of literary genres.
I am not disputing the centrality of the novel in the contemporary literary field, which has made the genre a worthy object of extensive and careful attention. At the same time, such valorization in the context of literary theory has created a deformity: it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the formal features and aesthetic imperatives of other prose genres and evaluate them according to criteria, conventions, and expectations that are not related to the novel (see Bekhta 2025a and 2025b for elaboration). This narrowing down of the scope of theoretical and critical attention is particularly visible in the considerations of pre-modern and non-Western literary phenomena. Thus, texts with epic, utopian, satirical, biographical, or explicit political aspirations—all remnants of the pre-novelistic world-system of genres—are usually treated as (experimental) variations of the novel or, if studied in a historical perspective, as contributions to the novel genre’s uninterrupted developmental history.
Thus, in Estranging the Novel (2021) Katarzyna Bartoszyńska examines Irish and Polish literary traditions and texts by Narcyza Żmichowska, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Ignacy Krasicki, Witold Gombrowicz, and others. She rightly notes that, given the centrality of the novel to most influential histories of literature, these Irish and Polish texts (and peripheral literatures more generally) are usually approached as “a series of flawed imitations” (2021, 4) of a particular kind of (realist, British) novel, which these national traditions could only belatedly develop. Her solution to this critical bias is not to redraw genre history altogether but to expand the category of the novel so that it can include previously excluded texts and traditions as special kinds of novels and noteworthy, if marginal, contributions to its formal development (Bartoszyńska 2021, 14, 127)—which is to say, as contributions to the development of literary fiction in general.
In addition to such attempts at rehabilitating certain fictions as properly novelistic, another recent trend in literary theory is to rehabilitate the value of ‘genre fictions’: SF and fantasy, romance and horror, young adult fiction and comic books are becoming legitimate objects of study. These fictions, as Stephen Shapiro has argued, “were consigned to the low status as sub-literary” in the first place because of the novel’s rise to prominence in the late-eighteenth century as a literary-cultural form that could speak to new liberal and individual-centric (rather than collective) concerns and maintain the nascent divisions between amateur and expert spheres and between the political and private domains (2026, 31). In the context of Early American Studies, Shapiro and Philip Barnard note: “Before 1820, the novel was still in flux, formally speaking, and coexisted with a host of alternative forms of expression. Yet once the novel became dominant, it became so dominant that it tended to obscure or efface the prior existence of these other forms as contemporaneous competitors” (Barnard and Shapiro 2022, 552). This dominance has produced anachronistic approaches to non-novelistic form and skewed theoretical pictures of early modern periods—and, I should add, of world-literary traditions that have followed alternative genre paths, such as those of Eastern Europe (of which more below).[3]
By way of experiment and in order to try and defamiliarize the novel as a genre, we can pit it against another genre term, very much alive today in non-literary contexts: utopia, that “honorable, if unnovelistic, mode of fiction” (Elliott 1970, 104). Works by Jonathan Swift and Ignacy Krasicki, studied by Bartoszyńska, already point us in this direction. Interestingly, utopia also comes up in Boxall’s The Value of the Novel, in the discussion of the relationship between fiction and the law. Boxall starts this discussion with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)—“a work which can be considered a prototype of the novel form that developed more fully in the early eighteenth century” (Boxall 116). While a retrospective inclusion of such an unquestionable bestseller as Utopia in the long history of the novel doesn’t raise immediate objections, if we look at the reception of various utopias in their own historical moment, they often evoke explicit formal tensions precisely in relation to the novel.
Let’s consider the example of Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962). Robert C. Elliott has described it as the utopia of our times, the “post-modern vision of the good place that speaks most cogently against despair” (1970, 129). But it’s hardly been read as a utopia and, consequently I’d say, it is hardly talked about, compared to Huxley’s dystopian favorite Brave New World (1932). Dystopias, unlike utopias, offer a set of formal properties familiar to the readers of the novel: plot tensions, psychological conflicts, complex or conflicted characters, and so on. Upon its publication, Elliott remarks, Frank Kermode deemed Island one of the worst novels ever written and Wayne Booth struggled with pronouncing an aesthetic judgment on the book altogether—since, he claimed, there were no criteria for its “nameless and tricky genre” yet (Booth qtd. in Elliott 1970, 129).
Another illuminating case, although in a different way, is the reception of the key European utopia of the twentieth century—Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s The Sun Machine. Written during 1921–1924 and published in 1928, this is a remarkable text, an 800-page positive utopia written at a time firmly associated with the rise of dystopias. These dystopias came to be emblematic of the Soviet region and its political system and continue to capture the imagination of contemporary readers still—think of all the books, comics, and films that have been generated by the storyworlds of Orwell, Huxley, or Zamyatin. What is remarkable about The Sun Machine is not just its resolute optimism regarding the possibility of utopian transformation after the Great War and after the violence of the revolutions in Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Russian empire. What is also remarkable is The Sun Machine’s immense success: upon its publication, three consecutive editions were sold out, leading to queues in libraries across Ukraine and, at the same time, to endless literary-critical polemics about its qualities.[4]
Unlike Island, The Sun Machine was published with the genre label “A utopian novel”. But in this case, renowned literary scholars and influential critics proceeded to question how fitting that label was with respect to the text (see, e.g., Biletskyi 1928; Zerov 1929).[5] While ultimately rejecting the utopian status of The Sun Machine but praising it for opening up a new, fresh chapter for the development of the literary novel in the Ukrainian literary field at the time, both Oleksandr Biletskyi and Mykola Zerov found multiple formal flaws in the book: Vynnychenko’s characters lacked psychological depth, the motivation for their actions was often unclear and it didn’t align with their (stereo)typical psychological portraits, or—and most interesting for my purpose here—the author was playing tricks on the reader by arranging the plot in a certain way. Zerov (1929, 189), for example, notes that the novel’s initial set-up, having lured the reader in with a rich and intriguing constellation of potential storylines and narrative conflicts, turns out to be false! Instead, it transpires that the one real conflict, central to the book and driving the plot, is the utopian invention of the sun machine and Vynnychenko’s real interest is not offering a convincing fiction but, in fact, a thorough and polemical examination of a certain social ideal. In other words, it turns out that The Sun Machine does in fact subordinate any formal features and values associated with the modern novel to its utopian agenda.
It is worth citing Elliott here again: “Most writers of fictional utopias have had far more interest in, and commitment to, the social-political aspects of their work than to the fiction, which they have considered largely instrumental—a means, not available to the philosopher, to ‘strike, pierce [and] possess the sight of the soul’, as Sidney puts it in the Apology for Poetry” (1970, 111).[6] In short, if literary theory and criticism cannot pinpoint this “nameless and tricky” genre and proceeds to measure literary utopias with the novel’s yardstick, this then often leads to a critique of utopia’s formal qualities and aesthetic flaws or to ahistorical evaluations of its political propositions.
***
Today the novel’s dominance over prose fiction and its successful and irreversible cannibalization (or novelization) of its former rivals has become an axiom of literary theory. At the same time, theory keeps running into ‘curious’ or ‘faulty’ exceptions from this rule (Franco Moretti’s [1996] Modern Epic, for example, is built around such an exception). If these exceptions are not discarded as formally or aesthetically flawed novels, they are incorporated into the long and bifurcating history of the novel by assimilation (as is the case in Bartoszyńska 2021). My present counter-suggestion to what I perceive as a dominant trend in literary theory is twofold: First, what if we turn the argument around and ask whether the potential genre rivals to the novel retain at least a residual presence? Entertaining such a possibility, we would be able to set the novel into a heuristic opposition[7] with other prose genres and thereby reveal its often invisible conventions and narrative expectations. Utopia, for example, can productively illuminate a number of issues related both to values expressed by a literary work of art and to the parameters of value creation in the literary-theoretical field (as I have briefly discussed in the case of Huxley’s Island and Vynnychenko’s The Sun Machine). Second, from world-literary and literary-historical perspectives, theories of literary value, implicitly or explicitly focused on the novel, are partial or incomplete. Current theoretical debates in world literature, for example, expose a hierarchy of literary traditions whereby those that lack ‘the Big Novel’ do not join the production of literary concepts.[8] In other words, treated as ‘immature’ in the formal sense, they can only figure as objects of literary analysis but almost never as subjects in the development of its conceptual apparatuses. Arguably, the absence of the literary semi-periphery, such as Eastern-European or “second-world” literatures, from the theoretical vocabulary is in part due to the poetic-satirical inclinations of its canons (Bekhta 2025a) or, in the case of peripheral or “third-world” literatures, it stems partly from their preference for shorter prose forms and allegorical modes of expression (Pravinchandra 2018; Jameson 2019). A rehabilitation of non-novelistic genres within contemporary literary theory – and I’m not speaking about interventions into the literary field, of course! – can potentially make it easier to appreciate the complexity of world-literary history and move beyond developmental arguments, which tend to line up various literary traditions and genres into one long history of the novel (for details see, e.g., Shapiro 2023).
In sum, the symbolic power of the novel conditions contemporary debates about literary value as it also dominates literary theory more generally. This power remains underexamined, but we can see it at work in misreadings of and confusion around other, non-novelistic genres, such as utopia. We see it in the structure of literary-historical arguments that project a developmental trajectory of the rise and spread of this particular genre, confining non-novelistic literary traditions to a place on the receiving end of such movement. We can discern it in the habitual slips of terminology, where a study of a set of novels from a particular place and time (although never from the world-literary peripheries) can also mean literary fiction in general, allowing for bold and far-reaching book titles. Literary theory does need shared canons, however imperfect and dynamic they may be: they are convenient, if we want to have any kind of scholarly exchange or draw on potential common ground in a classroom. But we also need to illuminate the largely homogeneric focus of such canons, and we need to be able to see the conventions—and limitations—at work in a genre so dominant that it often becomes invisible.
References
Barnard, Philip, and Stephen Shapiro. 2022. “Un-Noveling Brown: Liberalism and Its Literary Discontents”. Early American Literature 57, no. 2: 549–54.
Bartoszyńska, Katarzyna. 2021. Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bekhta, Natalya. 2025a. “Beyond the Novel: Satire in Eastern Europe and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen”. In Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 66, no. 1: 12–22.
—. 2025b. “The Novel Goes Utopia: On Volodymyr Vynnycheko’s The Sun Machine”. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia 70, no. 3: 41–58.
Biletskyi, Oleksandr. 1990 [1928]. “Sonyachna mashyna Volodymyra Vynnychenka”. In Literaturno-krytychni statti (Literary-critical articles), edited by M. L. Hroncharuk, 121–31. Kyїv: Dnipro.
Boxall, Peter. 2015. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brier, Evan. 2024. Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965-1999. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press
Clover, Joshua, and Christopher Nealon. 2017. “Literary and Economic Value”. In Christopher Nealon, Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital, 195-213. Leiden: Brill.
Colvin, Sarah. 2025. Literature and Epistemic Injustice: Power and Resistance in the Contemporary Novel. London: Routledge.
Elliott, Robert C. 1970. The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ganguly, Debjani. 2016. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
—. 2020. “The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives Introduction”. New Literary History 51, no. 2: v–xvii.
Jameson, Fredric. 2019 [1986]. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”. In Allegory and Ideology, 159–86. London: Verso.
—. 2019. “Commentary”. In Allegory and Ideology, 187–215. London: Verso.
Mazzoni, Guido. 2017 [2011]. Theory of the Novel. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McGurl, Mark. 2021. Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. London: Verso.
Moretti, Franco.1996. Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García-Márquez. London: Verso.
Mufti, Aamir R. 2018 [2016]. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nünning, Ansgar. 2025. “Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life. The Potential of a Scientific Metaphor and the Value of Literature.” In New Conjectures and Directions in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis and Ansgar Nünning. REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol. 39. Tübingen: Narr.
Pavylyshyn, Marko. 1989. “Artist or Moralist? Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s ‘The Solar Machine’”. Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 3, no. 2: 1733.
Pravinchandra, Shital. 2018. “Short Story and Peripheral Production”. In The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, edited by Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler, 197–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shapiro, Stephen. 2023. “The World-System of Global Gothic, Horror and Weird”. In The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, edited by Rebecca Duncan, 38–52. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
—. 2026. “The Undead’s Capitalist World-System”. In The Cambridge Companion to World-Gothic, edited by Rebecca Duncan and Rebekah Cumptsy, 25–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Soroka, Mykola. 2006. “Mistse dlya utopii”. Krytyka, no. 105-106: 33–36.
—. 2012. Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Syvachenko, Halyna. 1994. “’Sonyachna mashyna’ V. Vynnychenka i roman-antyutopia XX storichchya”. Slovo i chas, no. 1: 42–47.
Vynnychenko, Volodymyr. 1989 [1928]. Sonyachna mashyna [The sun machine]. Kyїv: Dnipro.
Zerov, Mykola. 1929. “‘Sonyachna mashyna’ yak literaturnyi tvir”. In Vid Kulisha do Vynnychenka: Narysy o novitnioho ukraїnskoho pys’menstva, 173–91. Kyїv: Kultura.
[1] Work on this essay has been funded by the Research Council of Finland (grant decision no. 361957).
[2] The concept of value in the symbolic sense cannot be fully separated from its economic meaning, as Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon (2017) have demonstrated, but in this essay I stick to the focus on the ties between the novel and literary theory without discussing the economic meaning of ‘value’ explicitly. See also the contributions of Sedlmayr and Taylor in this cluster. For a recent discussion of value of literature in relation to the utopian question of how to live well see Nünning 2025.
[3] I should also note an increasing recognition of a more granular genre dynamic in the contemporary literary field, but this recognition seems confined to genre theory at the moment. See, e.g., Brier 2020, which studies the formal repercussions and literary effects of the emergence at the end of the twentieth century of a new prestige economy in which the American novel lost its privileged cultural standing and started to compete with cultural forms from the fields of cinema, music, and journalism.
[4] It also went through three editions in the authorized Russian translation by Rosalia Vynnychenko, thus reaching far across the Soviet Union.
[5] And the debate continued till the end of the century. See., e.g., Pavlyshyn 1989 and Syvachenko 1994. See Soroka 2006 for a defense of utopia.
[6] Cf. Halyna Syvachenko on The Sun Machine: “Here, just like in the expressionistic works in general, the main idea is set. Instead of the unity of form and content, form itself has a derivative function and plot [sjuzhet], even if it isn’t explicitly schematic, offers characters as ‘mouthpieces for ideas’, tentative placeholders for the author’s thoughts, or supportive elements in the allegorical fabula, in the artificial [!], fake narrative conflict” (1994, 44).
[7] I use ‘opposition’ here in the linguistic sense, where meaning is understood as differential because it emerges out of relations of words to other words within the same system: E.g. the meaning of ‘hot’ only makes sense if there is ‘cold’ and so on. In the system of genre, in other words, the limits of the novel would become clear when it’s set into a comparative or oppositional relation to another genre.
[8] In addition to the general leaning of world-literary theory towards the cultural Anglosphere, as has been long pointed out. See Mufti 2016.