Each major novelistic form answers to a specific phase of capitalist development.

Evidence

For more than a century, scholars have understood the novel and capitalism to have a very special relationship; because the novel is the literary form unique to capitalism, it uniquely mediates capitalist relations, propelled as it is by a dialectic of society and the individual, the exemplary and the exceptional, worldly details and astral wisdom. Thus, the early English novel confronts capitalist dynamics like enclosure and mercantilism through adventures of shipwreck and casting on to the marriage market; or the great nineteenth-century novel reckons with urbanization, revolution, and colonialism through large casts of characters jostling for social coherence; or the modernist novel contemplates total war and the global market through streams of consciousness and cinematic propulsion; or the postmodern novel stages complete commoditization through metafictional irony and pastiche. If there is transformation in the history of the novel in the twenty-first century, to what capitalist transformation does it correspond? — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 133

Categorization

• XREF: This is a textbook Jamesonian correspondence-historical framework; the reader should use it to judge Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson.