"While some literary critics have traced the origins of the novel back to ancient Greece, the modern novel as an access to the narratives of bourgeois modernity emerged into Western culture in the late seventeenth century. The struggle of that class toward definition and the striving to articulate its character is central to the novel and the stories it tells. Its novelty is found in a formlessness that nonetheless aspires to some idea of order and unity. Indeed, the energies of the early modern novel form can be discerned in its constant assertion of narratives that enact that search for completeness while also allowing for a kind of mourning for the security that older, traditional forms and stories allowed. Thus, novelists, then as now, revel in the possibilities that formal innovation permits while their characters find themselves forced to acknowledge the newness of their world and their experiences in that world"--