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Lecture
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Emergence and Evolution of the Novel
The Novel : Definitions and Distinctions
Genre: Fiction and Narrative
Style: Prose
Length: Extended
Purpose: Mimesis or 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
Verisimilitude
Refers to the illusion that the novel is a representation of real life. Verisimilitude results from :
a correspondence between the world presented in the novel and the real world of the reader
Recognizable settings and characters in real time what 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
Precursors to the Novel
Heroic Epics
Gilgamesh,
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, 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 Tales
A Thousand and One Nights
Medieval European Romances:
Arthurian tales culminating in Malory’s Morte Darthur
Elizabethan Prose Fiction:
Gascoigne’s The Adventure of Master F. J, 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
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The First Novels
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Don Quixote ( Spain, 1605-15) by Miguel de Cervantes
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The Princess of Cleves (France, 1678) by Madame de Lafayette
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Robinson Crusoe (England, 1719) , Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by Daniel DeFoe
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Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (England, 1740-1742) by Samuel Richardson
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Joseph Andrews (England, 1742) and Tom Jones (1746)by Henry Fielding
Types of Novels
Picaresque Regional
Epistolary Social
Sentimental Mystery
Gothic Science Fiction
Historical Magical Realism
Psychological
Realistic/Naturalistic
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
First European novel: part I - 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?
The Princess of Cleves
Madame de Lafayette
First European historical novel – recreates life of 16th c. French nobility at the court of Henri II
First roman d'analyse (novel of analysis), dissecting emotions and attitudes
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The Rise of the English Novel
The Restoration of the monarchy (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’s First Professional Female Author: Aphra Behn 1640-1689
Novels
Love Letters between a Nobleman and his sister (1683)
The Fair Jilt (1688)
Agnes de Castro (1688)
Oroonoko (c.1688)
She also wrote many dramas
Daniel Defoe
Master of plain prose and powerful narrative
Journalistic style: highly realistic detail
Travel adventure: Robinson Crusoe, 1719
Contemporary chronicle: Journal of the Plague Year , 1722
Picaresques : Moll Flanders, 1722 and Roxana
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Picaresque Novels
The name comes from the Spanish word picaro: a rogue A usually autobiographical chronicle 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: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Epistolary Novels
Novels in which the narrative is told in letters by one or more of the characters
Allows the author to present the feelings and reactions of the characters, and to bring immediacy to the plot, also allows multiple points of view
Psychological realism
Contemporary epistolary novels: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple;
The Novel: A Definition
According to M.H. Abrams:
“The term novel is now applied to a great variety of writings that have in common only the attribute of
being extended works of fiction written in prose. […] Its magnitude permits a greater variety of characters, greater complication of plot (or plots), ampler development of milieu, and more sustained exploration of character and motives than do the shorter, more concentrated modes.”
The emergence of the novel
The emergence of the novel was made possible by many factors.
The most important are:
1. The development of the printing press: which enables mass production of reading material.
2. The emergence of a middle class (“middle station”) with the leisure to read.
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Lecture
2
Emergence and Evolution of the Novel
Pioneers of the English Novel
The Novel of Manners:
Jane Austen
Samuel Richardson 1689-1761
Pamela
(1740) and
Clarissa
(1747-48)
Epistolary
Sentimental
Morality tale: Servant resisting seduction by her employer Henry Fielding
1707-1754
Shamela
(1741)
Joseph Andrews
(1742), and
Tom Jones
(1749)
Picaresque protagonists
“comic epic in prose”
Parody of Richardson
Novels dominated by the 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
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Gothic Novels
Novels characterized by magic, mystery and horror
Exotic settings – 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
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 1797-1851
One of the most famous gothic novels
Inspired by a dream in reaction to a challenge to write a ghost story
Published in 1817 (rev. ed. 1831)
Influenced by the Greek myth of Prometheus
Frankenstein is also considered the first science fiction novel Novels of Sentiment Novels in which the characters, and thus the readers, have a heightened emotional response to events
Connected to emerging Romantic movement
Laurence Sterne: Tristam Shandy (1760-67)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Francois Rene de Chateaubriand: Atala (1801) and Rene (1802)
The Brontës: Anne Brontë Agnes Grey (1847) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
The Brontës
Charlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48), Anne (1820-49)
Wuthering Heights and Jane 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
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Historical Novels
Novels that reconstruct a past age, often when two 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)
Realism and Naturalism
Social Realism
Social or Sociological novels deal with the nature, function 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.
Social Realism Cont.
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
Middle class
Pragmatic
Psychological
Mimetic art
Objective, but 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
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Charles Dickens 1812-1870
By including varieties of poor people in all his 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."
Charles Dickens Cont. 1812-1870
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 Russian Novel
Russia from 1850-1920 was a period of social, 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.
The Russian Novel Cont.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910): The Cossacks Anna Karenina War and Peace Resurrection
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) The Gambler Crime and Punishment Notes from Underground The Brothers Karamazov