The Novel 100:

A Ranking of the
Greatest Novels of All Time
The list below is from the book The Novel 100: A Ranking of Greatest Novels All
Time (Checkmark Books/Facts On File, Inc.: New York, 2004), written by Daniel S.
Burt.
Burt holds a Ph.D from New York University with a specialty in Victorian fiction
and was for nine years a dean at Wesleyan University, where he has also taught
literature courses since 1989. He is also the author of The Novel 100: A Ranking
of the Greatest Novels of All Time.
Note that in compiling the list of novels that was the basis for this book, Burt
had to impose a number of constraints about what should be considered a novel.
Although some works recognized as classics of science fiction (or, more broadly,
speculative fiction) are on the list (e.g., Frankenstein; Dracula; Nineteen Eig
hty-Four), Burt specifically excluded works that seemed to veer too much from pr
imarily naturalistic and contemporary-oriented narratives, thus excluding from c
onsideration most science fiction and fantasy. Books such as Tolkien's The Lord
of the Rings, Card's Ender's Game, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Frank H
erbert's Dune were excluded from consideration as "novels." Burt's functional de
finition of "novel" used here (i.e., books belonging to the "novel genre" or, in
most cases, the "literary novel genre") is thus narrower than how the word is u
sed by the general public. From the book's introduction, pages ix-x:
What makes a listing of the greatest novels even more problematic is the lac
k of any consensus about which works rightfully constitute the genre... the nove
l is such a hybrid and adaptive genre, assimilating other prose and verse forms.
.. A standard definition of the novel--an extended prose narrative--is so broad
that it fails to limit the field usefully... I have been influenced in this rega
rd, like many, by literary critic Ian Watt's groundbreaking 1957 study, The Rise
of the Novel, which contends that the novel as a distinctive genre emerged in 1
8th-century England through the shifting of the emphasis of previous prose roman
ces and their generalized and idealized characters, settings, and situations to
a particularity of individual experience. In other words, the novel replaced the
romance's interest in the general and the ideal with a concern for the particul
ar. The here and now substituted for the romance's interest in the long ago and
far away. As 18th-century novelist Clara Reece observed, "The Novel is a picture
of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written. The Romance
, in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likel
y to." Novelists began to represent the actual world accurately, governed by the
laws of probability.
...It would be far too reductive and misleading, however, to define the nove
l only by its realism or accurate representation of ordinary life... It would be
far more accurate to say that the novel as a distinct genre attempts a synthesi
s between romance and realism, between a poetic, imaginative alternative to actu
ality and a more authentic representation. For purposes of my listing, I have na
rrowed the field by categorizing as novels works that engage in that synthesis.
Some narrative works judged too far in the direction of fantasy--Rabelais's Garg
antua and Pantagruel, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Swift's Gulliver's Travel
s, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland--have been excluded. I have also made judgment
calls on the question of the required length of a novel and have ruled out of co
ntention such important fictional works as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis as falling short of the amplitude expected when
confronting a novel.