Introduction: Form and Medium

This is the second issue of Novel to draw from papers originally accepted by the Society for Novel Studies conference that was due to take place in April 2020 but was one of the early casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some additional essays that address our themes. We selected essays that spoke to a fundamental question for scholars of the novel: how and why do we still recognize a textual entity made familiar by the term novel when novels have been so generative of other forms of discourse? Since Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, we have been used to plotting heterogeneity from the start (from whenever we may date the novel). Novels, we know, are composite things, drawing on other forms, driven by the rapidly changing demands of readers and the material technologies of publishing. The novel has taken many shapes—serial publication, triple-decker, graphic novel—whereby formal...