Encyclopedic novel

[3] Mendelson's essays examine the encyclopedic tendency in the history of literature, considering the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Faust, and Moby-Dick, with an emphasis on the modern Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow.

Commonly cited examples of encyclopedic novels in the postmodern period include, in addition to Pynchon, Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations (1991), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997).

Mendelson also ascribed encyclopedic authors a nationalistic or patriotic function as codifiers of a single national culture that their work later comes to define, for example the Comedy for Florence and Italy, Don Quixote for Spain, Moby Dick for the United States (compare Great American Novel), and Ulysses for Ireland.

She explains that the urge to order the sum of all knowledge grew exponentially during the Renaissance and that by the 20th century we see writers such as Pound and James Joyce (whose Finnegans Wake is an example of an encyclopedic novel) simply recycling narratives.

[16] One critical review questions why a novelist would paradoxically reference a fictional universe, and what literary purpose is served by the proliferation of the "junk text" that is often a carrier of the encyclopedic conceit.

Giving examples of "junk text" in encyclopedic fiction, the review cites "the pseudo-scientific cetology chapter" in Moby-Dick and "minor-character chatter about art and economics" in William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955) and J R (1975).

[18] Encyclopedic novels such as Infinite Jest or House of Leaves include extensive and sometimes nonsensical footnotes referencing a variety of in-universe and out-of-universe subjects, thus directly adopting the conventions of academic writing while also creating a layer of "cruft" that the reader must actively parse in pursuit of the core narrative.