How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

Foster answers two important questions in the Preface. The first is why the novel remains an enduring form of writing. The second question Foster tackles is why he needed to write a separate book on reading novels when he already authored one on appreciating literature.

To answer his first question, Foster explains that the novel endures as the dominant book genre because it uniquely immerses readers in its characters’ lives. Furthermore, novels encourage active and involved reading, which amounts to a collaboration between the author and the reader. Thinking about the characters, their motives, the subtext of the narrative, and other elements is part of the process of reading a novel, which makes readers complicit in creating meaning in the novel.

Another reason the novel endures is that it can reinvent itself. The name of the genre itself means “new” and alludes how, when it first became popular in Europe, the novel was a radical way of writing prose fiction narratives. Even when it is proclaimed a dying form, the novel comes back with fresh possibilities, as it did in the late 1960s. In 1967, French philosopher Rolan Barthes authored an essay called “The Death of the Author,” stating that the writer no longer existed, in the sense that only readers’ interpretations could provide freshness to the novel.