Criticism of the Novel: From the Aesthetic to the Cultural

Abstract

This article examines the transformation of novel criticism from its classical
aesthetic foundations toward contemporary cultural analytical frameworks.
Beginning with the formalist traditions established by figures such as Henry
James and Percy Lubbock, the study traces how literary criticism progressively
incorporated sociological, ideological, and postcolonial perspectives
throughout the twentieth century. The article argues that the cultural turn in
novel criticism—pioneered by theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Terry
Eagleton, and Edward Said—did not abandon aesthetic considerations but
rather expanded them to encompass the novel's function as a social and
ideological document. Drawing on key theoretical texts from both Western and
Arab critical traditions, this article demonstrates that contemporary novel
criticism operates at the intersection of the aesthetic and the cultural, producing
a richer, more comprehensive understanding of narrative as a site of meaning
making, power negotiation, and identity construction. The article concludes
that the most productive form of novel criticism today is one that maintains a
dialectical relationship between aesthetic analysis and cultural interpretation,
refusing to reduce the novel to either pure form or pure ideology.