Begetting the Novel; or: On the Conception and Reproduction of a Literary Genre

By means of an in-depth, multi-level metafi ctional analysis of an exemplary case study, Jeą rey Eugenides’ Pulitzer-win-ning novel Middlesex (2002), this contribution aims at testing the historiographical and critical aą ordances of the ‘litera-ture/generation nexus’, i.e., the culturalist reading of litera-ture through the phenomenology and history of generations, and vice versa. The study’s purpose is a twofold one. It fi rstly and generally aims at exploring the metalinguistic tools of-fered by this methodology, with a view to identifying and so-lidifying key critical tropes, such as tradition vs. innovation, ancestry vs. evolution, heritage vs. transformation, reces-siveness vs. dominance, perpetuation vs. discontinuity, etc. Secondly, and more specifi cally, it seeks to shed light on the conception, reproduction, birth and growth of the novel form itself as a privileged creature in the modern generational (as well as cultural) ecosystem. The semantic intertwining of ‘genre’, ‘gender’ and ‘genius’ displayed by the examined case study – a chain of meanings that is actually among the most fruitful heritage of the Latin term generāre (“to beget”) – will be showcased as a prominent aspect of the novel form as a “synthesis of the heterogeneous” (Ricoeur 1984), and as a privileged laboratory for practices of contamination, hybridi-sation, cross-fertilisation (Bakhtin 1979), since its very incep-tion in the early eighteenth century.