Friends are at the centre of novels by everyone from George Eliot to Elena Ferrante. It is nearly impossible to name a work of fiction that is not enriched by the tensions and magnetisms of friendship.

Friendship and the Novel focuses on the affective and narrative possibilities created by friendship in fiction. Friendship enables plots about rivalry, education, compassion, pity, deceit, betrayal, animosity, and breakup. It crosses boundaries of gender, class, nationality, disposition, race, age, and experience. Some novels offer lessons about distinguishing good friends from bad. In a Bildungsroman, friends contribute to the development of the protagonist through example or advice, as if novels were manuals for making and keeping friends. Sometimes sparks fly between friends and friendship swerves into sexual intimacy. Sally Rooney and other contemporary writers take friendship online.

The essays in Friendship and the Novel illustrate how friendship, in its many forms – short or lifelong, intense or circumstantial – is a central problem and an abiding mystery in fiction as in life, a subject that continues to shape the novel as a literary form and, in turn, its readers.

Contributors include Robert L. Caserio (Penn State), Maria DiBattista (Princeton), Jay Dickson (Reed), Brian Gingrich (Texas), Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State), Barry McCrea (Notre Dame), Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton), Erwin Rosinberg (Emory), Jacqueline Shin (Towson), Lisa Sternlieb (Penn State), and Emily Wittman (Alabama).

Allan Hepburn is the James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University.

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“Friendship and the Novel is not just a pleasure to read; it is a well-argued and engagingly written book that opens up new insights into a variety of authors. Its cumulative effect is to demonstrate that friendship and the novel is such an important, indeed inevitable, topic that it leaves one surprised such a book did not already exist.” J. Russell Perkin, Saint Mary’s University and author of Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s