Gets my attention

In Western literature, the form of the novel is coincidental with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in the late seventeenth century, and this is why, for its first century, the novel is all about birth, possible orphanhood, the discovery of roots, and the creation of a new world, a career, and society. Robinson Crusoe. Tom Jones. Tristram Shandy.

To locate a beginning in retrospective time is to ground a project (such as an experiment, or a governmental commission, or Dickens's beginning to write Bleak House) in that moment, which is always subject to revision. Beginnings of this sort necessarily involve an intention that either is fulfilled, totally or in part, or is viewed as totally failed, in successive time. And so the second great problematic is about the continuity that occurs after birth, the exfoliation from a beginning: in the time from birth to youth, reproductive generation, maturity. Every culture offers and circulates images of what has been wonderfully called the dialectic of incarnation, or in FranÁois Jacob's phrase, la logique du vivant. Again to give examples from the history of the novel (the Western aesthetic form that offers the largest and most complex image of ourselves that we have), there is the bildungsroman or novel of education, the novel of idealism and disappointment (L'Education sentimentale, Les Illusions perdues), the novel of immaturity and community (like George Eliot's Middlemarch, which the English critic Gillian Beer has shown was powerfully influenced by what she calls Dar- win's plots for the patterns of generation that structure this great novel of nineteenth-century British society). Other aesthetic forms, in music and painting, follow similar patterns.

But there are also exceptions, examples of deviation from the overall assumed pattern to human life. One thinks of Gulliver's Travels, Crime and Punishment, and The Trial, works that seem to break away from the amazingly persistent underlying compact between the notion of the successive ages of man (as in Shakespeare) and aesthetic reflections of and on them. For it bears saying explicitly that both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness, by which I mean that what is appropriate to early life is not appropriate for later stages, and vice versa. You will recall, for example, the stern biblical observation that to everything there is a season and a time, to every purpose under the heaven, a time to be born, and a time to die, and so on: "wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? ... All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean ...  -read more-

The text above likely tests the limits of fair use and was lifted from the first chapter of On Late Style by Edward Said, posted on The New York Times at First Chapters.  An NYT registration is required to follow the links.  I may have bitten off more than I can digest here but what I've read here will move me toward buying the book.  There is, I'm sure, a vast literature in the history of the novel of which I'm completely ignorant save for Jane Smiley and there, as is indicative of my depth, I have read only the review linked here.  I encourage your recommendations in the area to increase my resonance.