A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NOVEL

LENGTH: Extended
PURPOSE: Mimesis: Verisimilitude
“The Novel is a picture of

real life and manners, and of the time in which it is written. The Romance, in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen.” Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 1785

Hazlitt calls, “ the close imitation of men and manners…

the very texture of society as it really exists.”
The novel emerged when authors fused adventure and romance with verisimilitude and heroes that were not supermen but ordinary people, often, insignificant nobodies.

Mahabharata, Valmiki’s Ramayana, Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, The Song of Roland

Ancient Greek and Roman Romances and Novels An Ephesian Tale and Chaereas and Callirhoe, Petronius’s, Satyricon, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass
Oriental Frame Tales The Jataka, A Thousand and One Nights
Irish and Icelandic Sagas The Tain bo Cuailinge, Njal’s Saga

Malory’s Morte Darthur
Elizabethan Prose Fiction Gascoigne’s The Adventure of Master F.

J.,Lyly’s Euphues, Greene’s Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, Deloney’s Jack of Newbury
Travel Adventures Marco Polo, Ibn Batuta, More’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Candide
Novelle Boccaccio’s Decameron, Margurerite de Navarre’s Heptameron
Moral Tales Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progess, Johnson’s Rasselas

)by Lady Murasaki Shikibu
Monkey, Water Margin, and Romance of Three

Kingdoms (China, 16th c.)
Don Quixote ( Spain, 1605-15) by Miguel de Cervantes
The Princess of Cleves (France, 1678) by Madame de Lafayette
Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (England, 1683) and Oroonoko (1688)by Aphra Behn
Robinson Crusoe (England, 1719) , Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by Daniel DeFoe
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (England, 1740-1742) by Samuel Richardson
Joseph Andrews (England, 1742) and Tom Jones (1746)by Henry Fielding

Historical
Psychological
Realistic/Naturalistic

Regional
Social

Adventure
Mystery
Science Fiction
Magical Realism

c. Heian court
Relates the lives and loves of Prince Genji

and his children and grandchildren
Unesco Global Heritage Pavilion: The Tale of Genji

monopoly of power
Literary and artistic flowering
Ended in civil war with

civil wars and emergence of samurai culture

in Japanese prose
First novel: Genji Monogatari by Lady Murasaki Shikibu
Diaries:
The

Pillowbook by Sei Shonagan
As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams? by Lady Sarashina
The Tosa Diary

been a Buddhist monk, a bandit leader and a rebel

general – Emperor Hong Wu
Last native imperial dynasty in Chinese history
Re-adopted civil-service examination system
One of China’s most prosperous periods: agricultural revolution, reforestation, manufacturing and urbanization

of Chinese storytelling
Written in commoner’s language
Divided into chapters at points

where storytellers would have stopped to collect money
Classics of Chinese literature:
Water Margin, 16th c. – band of outlaws
Romance of Three Kingdoms, 16th c. – historical novel
Monkey: Journey to the West, 16th-17th c.

- 1605; part II - 1615
A psychological portrait of a

mid-life crisis
Satirizes medieval romances, incorporates pastoral, picaresque, social and religious commentary
What is the nature of reality?
How does one create a life?
The Cervantes Project

recreates life of 16th c. French nobility at the court

of Henri II
First roman d'analyse (novel of analysis), dissecting emotions and attitudes
Study guide for the The Princess of Cleves

(1660) in England after the Puritan Commonwealth (1649-1660) encouraged an

outpouring of secular literature
Appearance of periodical literature: journals and newspapers
Literary Criticism
Character Sketches
Political Discussion
Philosophical Ideas
Increased leisure time for middle class: Coffee House and Salon society
Growing audience of literate women
England in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Nobleman and his sister (1683)
The Fair Jilt (1688)
Agnes

de Castro (1688)
Oroonoko (c.1688)

Drama
The Forced Marriage (1670)
The Amorous Prince (1671)
Abdelazar (1676)
The Rover (1677-81)
The Feign'd Curtezans (1679)
The City Heiress (1682)
The Lucky Chance (1686)
The Lover's Watch (1686)
The Emperor of the Moon (1687)
Lycidus (1688)

detail
Travel adventure: Robinson Crusoe, 1719
Contemporary chronicle: Journal of the Plague

Year , 1722
Picaresques: Moll Flanders, 1722 and Roxana

of a rascal’s travels and adventures as s/he makes his/her

way through the world more by wits than industry
Episodic, loose structure
Highly realistic: detailed description and uninhibited expression
Satire of social classes
Contemporary picaresques: Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March; Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

by one or more of the characters
Allows author to present

feelings and reactions of characters, brings immediacy to the plot, allows multiple points of view
Psychological realism
Contemporary epistolary novels: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine; Kalisha Buckhannon’s Upstate

Epistolary
Sentimental
Morality tale: Servant resisting seduction by her

employer

Shamela (1741) Joseph Andrews (1742), and Tom Jones (1749)
Picaresque protagonists
“comic epic in prose”
Parody of Richardson

Samuel Richardson 1689-1761

Henry Fielding
1707-1754

customs, manners, conventional behavior and habits of a particular social

class
Often concerned with courtship and marriage
Realistic and sometimes satiric
Focus on domestic society rather than the larger world
Other novelists of manners: Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble

medieval, Oriental, etc.
Originated with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764)
William

Beckford: Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1786)
Anne Radcliffe: 5 novels (1789-97) including The Mysteries of Udolpho
Widely popular genre throughout Europe and America: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798)
Contemporary Gothic novelists include Anne Rice and Stephen King

a challenge to write a ghost story
Published in 1817 (rev.

ed. 1831)
A Gothic novel influenced by Promethean myth
The first science fiction novel

readers, have a heightened emotional response to events
Connected to emerging

Romantic movement
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768): Tristam Shandy (1760-67)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Francois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848): Atala (1801) and Rene (1802)
The Brontës: Anne Brontë Agnes Grey (1847) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Eyre transcend sentiment into myth-making
Wuthering Heights plumbs the psychic unconscious

in a search for wholeness, while Jane Eyre narrates the female quest for individuation
Brontë.info: website of Brontë Society and Haworth Parsonage
The Victorian Web

portrait by Branwell Brontë of his sisters, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte (c. 1834)

cultures are in conflict
Fictional characters interact with with historical figures

in actual events
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is considered the father of the historical novel: The Waverly Novels (1814-1819) and Ivanhoe (1819)

ethical
Sometimes comic or satiric
How can the individual live within and

influence society?
Honore Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, George Sand

Middle/Lower class
Scientific
Sociological
Investigative art
Objective and amoral
Often pessimistic, sometimes comic
How does society/the environment impact individuals?
Emile Zola, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser

and effect of the society which the characters inhabit –

often for the purpose of effecting reform
Social issues came to the forefront with the condition of laborers in the Industrial Revolution and later in the Depression: Dickens’ Hard Times, Gaskell’s Mary Barton; Eliot’s Middlemarch; Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath
Slavery and race issues arose in American social novels: Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 20th c. novels by Wright, Ellison, etc.
Muckrakers exposed corruption in industry and society: Sinclair’s The Jungle, Steinbeck’s Cannery Row
Propaganda novels advocate a doctrinaire solution to social problems: Godwin’s Things as They Are, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

novels, Dickens brought the problems of poverty to the attention

of his readers:
“It is scarcely conceivable that anyone should…exert a stronger social influence than Mr. Dickens has…. His sympathies are on the side of the suffering and the frail; and this makes him the idol of those who suffer, from whatever cause.” Harriet Martineau
The London Times called him "pre-eminently a writer of the people and for the people . . . the 'Great Commoner' of English fiction."
Dickens aimed at arousing the conscience of his age. To his success in doing so, a Nonconformist preacher paid the following tribute: "There have been at work among us three great social agencies: the London City Mission; the novels of Mr. Dickens; the cholera."

The Dickens Project, The Dickens Page
"Dickens' Social Background" by E. D. H. Johnson

political, and existential struggle.
Writers and thinkers remained divided: some

tried to incite revolution, while others romanticized the past as a time of harmonious order.
The novel in Russia embodied these struggles and conflicts in some of the greatest books ever written.
The characters in the works search for meaning in an uncertain world, while the novelists who created them experiment with modes of artistic expression to represent the troubled spirit of their age.

in contrariety… Tolstoy, the mind intoxicated with reason and fact;

Dostoevsky, the contemner of rationalism, the great lover of paradox; …Tolstoy, thirsting for the truth, destroying himself and those about him in excessive pursuit of it; Dostoevsky, rather against the truth than against Christ, suspicious of total understanding and on the side of mystery; …Tolstoy, like a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience; Dostoevsky, always on the verge of the hallucinatory, of the spectral, always vulnerable to daemonic intrusions into what might prove, in the end, to have been merely a tissue of dreams; ~ George Steiner in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (1959)

Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821-1881 The Gambler Crime and Punishment Notes from Underground The Brothers Karamazov

Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910 The Cossacks Anna Karenina War and Peace Resurrection

to the end of WW II (1945), known for radical

experimentation and rejection of the old order of civilization and 19th century optimism; a reaction against Realism and Naturalism
“Modern” implies historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss and despair – angst -- a loss of confidence that there exists a reliable, knowable ground of value and identity.
Horrors of WW I (1914-1918)
Modernism; Some Cultural Forces Driving Literary Modernism; Attributes of Modernist Literature; Modernism and the Modern Novel

On or about December 1910, the world changed.” -- Virginia Woolf

thoughts of the waking mind
Uninhibited by grammar, syntax or logical

transitions
A mixture of all levels of awareness – sensations, thoughts, memories, associations, reflections
Emphasis on how something is perceived rather than on what is perceived
James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner

James Joyce
1882-1941 The Dubliners Portrait of an Artist Ulysses Finnegan’s Wake

Virginia Woolf
1882-1941 To the LightHouse The Waves Mrs. Dalloway Orlando

and art – an age transformed by information technology, shaped

by electronic images and fascinated with popular art.
Rejects the elitism and difficulty of Modernism
Postmodernism celebrates the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence. “The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.”
Emphasis on reflexivity – fictions about fiction -- metafiction
Postmodernism; Some Attributes of Post-Modern Literature

and literary arts…. The frame of surface of he work

may be conventionally realistic, but contrasting elements – such as the supernatural, myth dream, fantasy – invade the realism and change the whole basis of the art.” Harmon and Holman
Latin American literary “Boom” began in the 1950s: Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Donoso, Mario Vargas Llosa
“ The authors involved are resolutely engaged in a transfiguration of Latin American reality, from localism to a kind of heightened, imaginative view of what is real--a universality gained by the most intense and luminous kind of locality.” Alexander Coleman

world views, and perceptions of reality.  What is absolutely ordinary

and "real" to one culture, is "magical" to the other culture. 
From a "Western" viewpoint, the other culture's reality is often described as superstition, witchcraft or nonsense.
From another culture's viewpoint (Native American, African American, Eastern, African, etc.) western logic and science are viewed as "magic" or disconnected from the spiritual world. 
The intersect of these different world views is Magical Realism.
Magical Realism Links 

of the Novel
Becoming a Modern Reader