But of course the world of The Theory of the Novel is characterized by the opposite state of affairs—by the ‘refusal of the immanence of meaning to enter into empirical life’.

A few years later, the analysis of reification of History and Class Consciousness (1919–1923) will offer a Marxist way out from those contradictions

Theory of the Novel belongs to the small circle of masterpieces—Baudelaire’s tableaux, Flaubert’s novels, Manet’s paintings, Ibsen’s plays, or, indeed, Weber’s last lectures—where the rules of bourgeois existence are at once ineluctable and bankrupt