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Lecture
1

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

The First Novels
-

Don Quixote ( Spain, 1605-15) by Miguel de Cervantes

The Princess of Cleves (France, 1678) by Madame de Lafayette

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

Types of Novels

 Picaresque Regional

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Epistolary Social

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Sentimental Mystery

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Gothic Science Fiction

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Historical Magical Realism

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Psychological

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Realistic/Naturalistic

Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)

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First European novel: part I - 1605; part II - 1615

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A psychological portrait of a mid-life crisis

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Satirizes medieval romances, incorporates pastoral, picaresque, social and religious commentary

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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

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First roman d'analyse (novel of analysis), dissecting emotions and attitudes

The Rise of the English Novel

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The Restoration of the monarchy (1660) in England after the Puritan Commonwealth (1649-1660) encouraged an outpouring of secular literature

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Appearance of periodical literature: journals and newspapers
Literary Criticism
Character Sketches
Political Discussion
Philosophical Ideas

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Increased leisure time for middle class: Coffee House and Salon society

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Growing audience of literate women

England’s First Professional Female Author: Aphra Behn 1640-1689

Novels

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Love Letters between a Nobleman and his sister (1683)

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The Fair Jilt (1688)

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Agnes de Castro (1688)

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Oroonoko (c.1688)
She also wrote many dramas

Daniel Defoe

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Master of plain prose and powerful narrative

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Journalistic style: highly realistic detail

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Travel adventure: Robinson Crusoe, 1719

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Contemporary chronicle: Journal of the Plague Year , 1722

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Picaresques : Moll Flanders, 1722 and Roxana

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

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Episodic, loose structure

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Highly realistic: detailed description and uninhibited expression

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Satire of social classes

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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

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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

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Psychological realism

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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.

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)

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Epistolary

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Sentimental

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Morality tale: Servant resisting seduction by her employer Henry Fielding
1707-1754

Shamela

(1741)

Joseph Andrews

(1742), and

Tom Jones

(1749)

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Picaresque protagonists

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“comic epic in prose”

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Parody of Richardson

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Novels dominated by the customs, manners, conventional behavior and habits of a particular social class

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Often concerned with courtship and marriage

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Realistic and sometimes satiric

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Focus on domestic society rather than the larger world

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Other novelists of manners: Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble

Gothic Novels

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Novels characterized by magic, mystery and horror

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Exotic settings – medieval, Oriental, etc.

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Originated with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) William Beckford: Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1786)

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Anne Radcliffe: 5 novels (1789-97) including The Mysteries of Udolpho

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Widely popular genre throughout Europe and America: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798)

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Contemporary Gothic novelists include Anne Rice and Stephen King

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 1797-1851

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One of the most famous gothic novels

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Inspired by a dream in reaction to a challenge to write a ghost story

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Published in 1817 (rev. ed. 1831)

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Influenced by the Greek myth of Prometheus

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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

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Connected to emerging Romantic movement

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Laurence Sterne: Tristam Shandy (1760-67)

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

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Francois Rene de Chateaubriand: Atala (1801) and Rene (1802)

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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

Historical Novels



Novels that reconstruct a past age, often when two cultures are in
conflict

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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

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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

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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

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Propaganda novels advocate a doctrinaire solution to social problems: Godwin’s Things as They Are, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

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Middle class

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Pragmatic

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Psychological

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Mimetic art

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Objective, but ethical

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Sometimes comic or satiric

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How can the individual live within and influence society?

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

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Middle/Lower class

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Scientific

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Sociological

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Investigative art

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Objective and amoral

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Often pessimistic, sometimes comic

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How does society/the environment impact individuals?

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Emile Zola, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser

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.

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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