The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time

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 Eighty-Four), Burt specifically excluded works that seemed to veer too much from primarily naturalistic and contemporary-oriented narratives, thus excluding from consideration 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 Herbert's Dune were excluded from consideration as "novels." Burt's functional definition 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 used 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 lack of any consensus about which works rightfully constitute the genre... the novel 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 regard, 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 18th-century England through the shifting of the emphasis of previous prose romances 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 particular. 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 likely 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 novel 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 synthesis between romance and realism, between a poetic, imaginative alternative to actuality and a more authentic representation. For purposes of my listing, I have narrowed the field by categorizing as novels works that engage in that synthesis. Some narrative works judged too far in the direction of fantasy--Rabelais'sGargantua and Pantagruel, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, 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 contention 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.