The essay was originally given as a paper in the Moscow Institute of World Literature on 24 March 1941 under the name "The Novel as a Literary Genre" ['Роман как литературный жанр'].
It was re-published in a 1975 collection of Bakhtin's writings, Questions of Literature and Aesthetics [Вопросы литературы и эстетики].
In this essay, Bakhtin attempts to outline a theory of the novel and its unique properties by comparing it to other literary forms, in particular the epic.
That is, its form and structure situate it in a distant past that assumes a finished quality, meaning it cannot be re-evaluated, re-thought or changed by us.
While Bakhtin does make reference to proto-novels in antiquity, he places the rise of the modern novel in the Renaissance and suggests that it developed then precisely because of a new temporal perspective: man had become conscious of the present not only as a continuation of the past, but also as a ‘heroic and new beginning’.