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Steven Moore Books

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“While it would be too reductive (but not wrong) to say Cervantes equates knight-errantry with religious belief, he does seem to insinuate a syllogism that goes: Chivalric novels are false; the Bible resembles those novels; therefore, the Bible is false. But Cervantes gleefully complicates matters by insisting repeatedly that Don Quixote is true, which he and everyone who reads it knows is untrue.”

BibleCervantesDon Quixote
Book:The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800
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“And if the novel [The Education of Cyrus] remains dull by modern standards, we have to remind ourselves Xenophon didn't set out to write a "novel" — there was no such thing yet in his culture — but was feeling his way to a new form somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic. Our hat is always off to innovators.”

NovelInnovatorsXenophon
Book:The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
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“I suppose someone could trawl through the 383 volumes of Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus and extract some book-length hagiographies that qualify as novels — there had to be a few protonovelists who adopted hagiography as the only game in town, as painters of religious subjects learned to do — but that someone isn't me.”

NovelHagiographyMigne
Book:The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
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“Nearly all of the stories [in The Heptameron] are about the sexual relations between men and women, with a large percentage dealing with the unromanic side: with rape, infidelity, the seduction of nuns and wives by monks (everyone in the Renaissance seems to have despised monks), loveless marriages, incest, and borderline necrophilia.”

Sexual RelationshipsHeptameron
Book:The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
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“The difference between mainstream fiction and literature is what their writers do with words; the former places its emphasis on the story rather than the language used to tell that story; in literature, the language is the story; that is, the story is primarily a vehicle for a linguistic display of the writer's rhetorical abilities.”

LiteratureMainstream Fiction
Book:The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
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