Saga novel
A saga novel is a genre encompassing the wide scopes of stories and narratives such as religious saga, national saga, family saga, human saga, etc.
History
Icelandic Tradition
The saga novel as a genre originates from the Icelandic history of family sagas[1]
Examples
A major example of a saga novel in English literature is George Eliot's Middlemarch. In Russia, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is a representative saga novel. In Korea, Kyunglee Park's Lands (Tohgee) is another example. In the United States, Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind belong to the category of saga novels. In China, Lo Guanzhong (Lo Kuanchung)'s Sanguo zhi yanyi (Sankuo chi yen-i; Romance of the Three Kingdoms) is the most representative and well-known saga novel since the 14th century.
| Title | Author | Year | Culture/Nation/Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buddenbrooks | Thomas Mann | 1901 | Germany |
| East of Eden | John Steinbeck | 1952 | US |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 1967 | Colombia |
| The Patternist Series | Octavia E. Butler | 1976 | US |
| Roots | Alex Haley | 1976 | US |
| Chesapeake | James A. Michener | 1978 | US |
| The House of the Spirits | Isabel Allende | 1982 | Chile |
| The Inheritance Trilogy | N. K. Jemisin | 2010 | US |
| Barkskins | Annie Proulx | 2016 | Canada/US |
| Homegoing | Yaa Gyasi | 2016 | Ghana/US |
| Pachinko | Min Jin Lee | 2017 | Korea/Japan |
| A Woman is No Man | Etaf Rum | 2019 | Arab/US |
| The Old Drift | Namwali Serpell | 2019 | Zambia |
| The Yellow House | Sarah M Broom | 2019 | New Orleans |
References