Novel

For other uses, see Novel (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Novell.

Novels (from the Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story of something new") are a popular form of literature, in which fictional depictions of life and events are described in written prose. In modern usage, novels can be distinguished from other forms of fiction as long written, fictional, prose narratives, which are usually published in book format.

Novels, in various guises, have had a long history. Fictional literature in ancient times was dominated by verse narratives, including poetry and historical epics that are still popular today. A few notable examples of prose narratives from this time can be found in literary histories around the world. The term "novel" appeared in medieval Europe to describe prose narratives that were short and topical, compared with epic, long "romances". The seventeenth-century genre conflict between long romances and short novels, novellas, has brought definitions of both traditions into the modern usage of the term. The popularity of novels has historically increased with improvements in printing technology and literacy.

As a predominantly fictional literary form, novels are often read for entertainment, although many can also be informative. As a written form, they are an important part of literacy and reading education. Modern novels cover a diverse range of genres, each of which exemplify a particular subject matter: popular genres include romances, science fiction, fantasy, crime and horror.

History

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; title page of 1719 newspaper edition.

Antecedents around the world

The modern novel has been thought of as an entirely European product. However, critics like Ian Watt had suggested in the 1950s that it is not merely an early 18th-century invention of English literature. The era of "romances" had ended before 1719 and "novels" had been appreciated as an alternative as early as 1613, the date when the Novelas Exemplares were published.^[1] Extended fictions with modern historical backgrounds were fashionable on the French international market before Robinson Crusoe appeared. A field of diverse sources and parallel histories had been established by that time. Pierre Daniel Huet's ground breaking study Traitté de l'origine des romans (1670) took the first steps looking for origins of the novel in the ancient Mediterranean cultures and in medieval Europe, in the epic tradition and in the traditions of shorter fictions.

Our notion of the epic tradition has grown since then: the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Indian epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata were unknown in Europe in the 1670s as were the European epic tales. Huet already noted Petronius' Satyricon, the incredible stories of Lucian of Samosata, and Lucius Apuleius' proto-picaresque The Golden Ass and a heroic strain with the romances of Heliodorus and Longus. The ancient Greek romance was revived by Byzantine novelists of the twelfth century. All these traditions were rediscovered in the 17th and 18th centuries where they influenced the modern book market. The novella is, however, related to universal oral traditions. Jokes would fall into a broad history of the "exemplary story" which gave rise to the more complex form of novelistic story telling. Fiction has its still wider context with the Bible being filled with similes and stories to be interpreted. Fiction is, as Huet noted, a rather universal phenomenon, though not a phenomenon with a single cause.

The history of prose fiction remains heterogeneous with parallel developments all around the globe. Early examples of prose novels include The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu in the 11th century, Philosophus Autodidactus by Ibn Tufail in the 12th century, Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis in the 13th century, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong in the 14th century. The inventions of paper and movable letters became, however, key factors the genre needed to step from isolated traditions into a market of exchange and awareness of the genre. Spanish, French, German, Dutch and English became the first languages of the new market. The national risings of the USA, Russia, Scandinavia and Latin America widened the spectrum in the 19th century. A wave of new literatures has brought forth novels with Asian and African authors since then. Their novels quickly became contributions to the history of world literature in the 19th century and in the 20th century were nourished with international awards such as the Nobel Prize in Literature; they make it problematic for any nation to remain unvoiced and unheard of. The novel has become a medium of national awareness on a global scale. The establishment of literature as the realm of fictions to be discussed, a 19th-century development, became the moving force behind this development.

The age of manuscript circulation

Anglophone histories of the novel have to cope with the special generic evolution which brought the word "novel" into the context of extended prose fictions.

• The period 1200–1750 saw a rise of the originally short piece of fiction rivalling then with the original "romance" (the epic-length performance). The rivalry was European, yet only the Spanish and the English went one step further and allowed the word novel (Spanish: novela) to become their regular term for fictional narratives.
• The period 1700–1800 saw a reversal, a rise of "new romances" in reaction to the production of potentially scandalous novels. The movement encountered a complex situation in the English market, where the term "new romance" could hardly be ventured, after all the novel had done to transform taste. The new genre adopted the name novel with the effect that the English (and Spanish) eventually needed a new word for the original short performance: The term novella was created to fill the gap in English; "short story" brought a further refinement.

The meaning of the term "romance" changed within the same complex process, becoming the word for a love story whether in life or fiction. Other meanings include the musicologist's genre "Romance" of a short and amiable piece, or Romance languages for the languages derived from Latin (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese).

Romance, 1000–1500

Main article: Romance (genre)

The word romance seems to have become the label of romantic fictions because of the "Romance" language in which early (11th and twelfth century) works of this genre were composed. The most fashionable genres developed in southern France in the late twelfth century and spread east- and northwards with translations and individual national performances. Subject matter such as Arthurian knighthood had already at that time traveled in the opposite direction, reaching southern France from Britain and French Brittany. As a consequence, it is particularly difficult to determine how much the early "romance" owed to ancient Greek models and how much to northern folkloric verse epics such as Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied.

The standard plot of the early romance was a series of adventures. Following a plot framework as old as Heliodorus, and so durable as to be still alive in Hollywood movies, a hero would undergo a first set of adventures before he met his lady. A separation would follow, with a second set of adventures leading to a final reunion. Variations kept the genre alive. Unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Gauvin et le Chevalier vert). Classics of the romance developed such as the Roman de la Rose, written first in French, and famous today in English thanks to the translation by Geoffrey Chaucer.

These original "romances" were verse works, adopting a "high language" thought suitable for heroic deeds and to inspire the emulation of virtues; prose was considered "low", more suitable for satire). Verse allowed the culture of oral traditions to live on, yet it became the language of authors who carefully composed their texts – texts to be spread in writing, thus to preserve the careful artistic composition. The subjects were aristocratic. The textual tradition of ornamented and illustrated handwritten books afforded patronage by the aristocracy or by the monied urban class developing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for whom knight errantry most clearly was a world of fiction and fantasy.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the emergence of the first prose romances along with a new book market. This market had developed even before the first printing facilities were introduced: prose authors could speak a new language, a language avoiding the repetition inherent in rhymes. Prose could risk a new rhythm and longer thoughts. Yet it needed the written book to preserve the coincidental formulations the author had chosen. While the printing press was yet to arrive, the commercial book production trade had already begun. Legends, lives of saints and mystical visions in prose were the main object of the new market of prose productions. The urban elite and female readers in upper class households and monasteries read religious prose. Prose romances appeared as a new and expensive fashion in this market. They could only truly flourish with the invention of the printing press and with paper becoming a cheaper medium. Both of these achievements arrived in the late fifteenth century, when the old romance was already facing fierce competition from a number of shorter genres; most salient among these genres was the novel, a form that arose in the course of the fourteenth century.

Early novel, 1000–1600

The Pilgrims diverting each other with tales; woodcut from Caxton's 1486 edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Sandro Botticelli, a scene from Boccaccio's novel Nastagio degli Onesti (1487). Madrid, Museo del Prado

It is difficult to give a full catalog of the genres that finally culminated – with the works of Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Niccolò Machiavelli and Miguel de Cervantes – in the original "novel", the production today generally categorized under the term "novella".

The early "novel", in contrast to the early "romance", was basically any story told for its spectacular or revealing incidents. The original environment in which this idea of the "novel" arose was simply entertaining conversation. Stories of grave incidents could augment sermons, and collections of these examples facilitated the work of preachers in need of such illustrations. A fable could illustrate a moral conclusion, but a short historical reflection, an anecdote, or a joke could do the same. A competition among the genres developed. If one believes the medieval collections, tastes within social statuses were decisive. The working classes loved their own brand of drastic stories of clever cheating, wit and ridicule levelled against hated social groups (or competitors among the storytellers). Much of this original conception of the genre is still alive with the short joke told in everyday life to make a certain humorous point in a conversation.

The longer form of the story evolved into collections of stories within a story: writings about situations in which a series of stories was allegedly told. Thus the author was able to write in a broad pattern of tastes and genres. The Canterbury Tales constitute a classic example in which noble storytellers performed "romantic" stories, while the lower narrators preferred stories of everyday life. The genre did not have its own generic term at this point, however; "Novel" simply denoted, at the time, the novelty of the accident narrated. The inclusion of the frame story, however – the collection of pilgrims to Canterbury – brought awareness to the fact that these several developing genres were part of a unified "Novel" tradition.

The main advantage of the background story was that it justified the telling of certain "lower" stories for actual authors such as Chaucer and Boccaccio. Romances were told in lofty language and relied on an accepted notion of what deserved to be read as high style. But as the taste in moral teachings and poetry changed, Romances quickly became outdated, and stories of cheats and pranks, illicit love affairs, and clever intrigues in which certain respectable professions or the citizens of another town were made fun of were still neither morally nor poetically justifiable. Through a frame tale, however, the storyteller could offer a few words explaining why he thought this story was worth telling. Again, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales afford the best examples: the real author could tell stories without any other justification than that this story gave a good portrait of the person who told it. That justification has remained stable throughout history.

As lofty performances grew tedious in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – with the old plots never leading to newer ones – collections of tales, or novels, made it possible to criticize the lofty performances, and to reduce their status: one of the group of narrators created by the author could start with the traditional romantic story, only to be interrupted by the other narrators listening within the story. They might silence him or order him to speak a language they liked, or they might ask him to speed up and to make his point. The result was a rise of the short genre. The steps of this development can be traced with the short story gaining in appreciation and value to rival romances in new versified collections at the end of the fourteenth century.

The novel on the early market of printed books, 1480–1800

Conflict between novels and romances, 1600–1700

The cheap design of chapbooks: The Honour of Chivalry, first published in 1598; title page of an early eighteenth century edition.

William Painter's Palace of Pleasure well furnished with pleasaunt Histories and excellent Novelles (1566), "novels" in the original sense of the word.

Miguel de Cervantes' Novelas Exemplares (1613).

The [...], or [...] formula promising an example; here, William Congreve's Incognita (1692) promising a reconciliation of love and duty.

The invention of printing subjected both novels and romances to a first wave of trivialization and commercialization. Printed books were expensive, yet something people would buy, just as people still buy expensive things they can barely afford. Alphabetization, or the rise of literacy, was a slow process when it came to writing skills, but was faster as far as reading skills were concerned. The Protestant Reformation created new readers of religious pamphlets, newspapers and broadsheets.

The urban population learned to read, but did not aspire to participation in the world of letters. The market of chapbooks developing with the printing press comprised both romances and short histories, tales and fables. Woodcuts were the regular ornament and they were offered without much care. A romance in which the heroic knight had to fight more than ten duels within a few pages could get the same illustration of such a fight again and again if the printer's stock of standard illustrations was small. As their stocks grew, printers repeated the same illustrations in other books with similar plots, mixing these illustrations without respect to style. One can open eighteenth century chapbooks and find illustrations from the early years of printing next to much more modern ones.

Romances were reduced to cheap and abrupt plots resembling some early comic books; neither were the first collections of novels necessarily prestigious projects. They appeared with an enormous variety from folk tales over jests to stories told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, now venerable authors.

A more prestigious market of romances developed in the sixteenth century, with multi-volume works aiming at an audience which would subscribe to this production. The criticism leveled against romances by Chaucer's pilgrims grew in response to both trivialization and the extended multi-volume "romances". Romances like the Amadis de Gaula led their readers into dream worlds of knighthood and fed them with ideals of a past no one could revitalize, or so the critics complained.

Italian authors like Machiavelli were among those who brought the novel into a new format: while it remained a story of intrigue, ending in a surprising point, the observations were now much finer: how did the protagonists manage their intrigue? How did they keep their secrets, what did they do when others threatened to discover them?

The whole question of novels and romances became critical when Cervantes added his Novelas Exemplares (1613) to the two volumes of his Don Quixote (1605/15). The famous satirical romance was levelled against the Amadis which had made Don Quixote lose his mind. Advocates of the lofty romance, however, would claim that the satirical counterpart of the old heroic romance could hardly teach anything: Don Quixote neither offered a hero to be emulated nor did it satisfy with beautiful speeches; all it could do was to make fun of lofty ideals. The Novelas Exemplares offered an alternative to the heroic and the satiric modes, yet critics were even less sure what to make of this production. Cervantes told stories of adultery, jealousy and crime. If these stories were to give examples, they gave examples of immoral actions. The advocates of the "novel" responded that their stories taught with both good and bad examples. The reader could still feel compassion and sympathy with the victims of crimes and intrigues, if evil examples were to be told.

The alternative to dubious novels and satirical romances were better, lofty romances: a production of romances modeled after Heliodorus arrived as a possible answer with excursions into the bucolic world. Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée (1607–27) became the most famous work of this type. The criticism that these romances had nothing to do with real life was answered through the device of the roman à clef (literally "novel with a key") – one that, properly understood, alludes to characters in the real world. John Barclay's Argenis (1625–26) appeared as a political Roman à clef. The romances of Madeleine de Scudéry gained greater influence with plots set in the ancient world and content taken from life. The famous author told stories of her friends in the literary circles of Paris and developed their fates from volume to volume of her serialized production. Readers of taste bought her books, as they offered the finest observation of human motives, characters taken from life, and excellent morals regarding how one should and should not behave if one wanted to succeed in public life and in the intimate circles she portrayed.

The novel went its own way: Paul Scarron (himself a hero in the romances of Madeleine de Scudéry) published the first volume of his Roman Comique in 1651 (successive volumes appeared in 1657 and, by another hand, in 1663) with a plea for the development Cervantes had introduced in Spain. France should (as he wrote in the famous twenty first chapter of the Roman Comique [1]) imitate the Spanish with little stories like those they called "novels". Scarron himself added numerous of such stories to his own work.

Twenty years later Madame de La Fayette took the next decisive steps with her two novels. The first, her Zayde (published in 1670 together with Pierre Daniel Huet's famous Treatise on the Origin of Romances), was a "Spanish history". Her second and more important novel appeared in 1678: La Princesse de Clèves proved that France could actually produce novels of a particularly French taste. The Spanish enjoyed stories of proud Spaniards who fought duels to avenge their reputations. The French had a more refined taste with minute observation of human motives and behavior. The story was firmly a "novel" and not a "romance": a story of unparalleled female virtue, with a heroine who had had the chance to risk an illicit amour and not only withstood the temptation but made herself more unhappy by confessing her feelings to her husband. The gloom her story created was entirely new and sensational.

The regular novel took another turn. The late seventeenth century saw the emergence of a European market for scandal, with French books now appearing mostly in the Netherlands (where censorship was liberal) to be clandestinely imported back into France. The same production reached the neighboring markets of Germany and Britain, where it was welcomed both for its French style and its predominantly anti-French politics. The novel flourished in this market as the best genre to purport scandalous news. The authors claimed the stories they had to tell were true, told not for the sake of scandal but only for the moral lessons they gave. To prove this, they fictionalized the names of their characters and told these stories as if they were novels. (The audience played its own game in identifying who was whom.) Journals of little stories appeared – the Mercure Gallant became the most important. Collections of letters added to the market; these included more of these little stories and led to the development of the epistolary novel in the late seventeenth century.

The novel had interested the English audience ever since Chaucer's days, it had been read in translations of Spanish and French novels throughout the 17th century. In the late 1680s English authors decided to create a modern English equivalent. Aphra Behn and William Congreve adopted the old term and wrote new "novels".

Embedded in the market of histories: 1650–1730

The early modern print market was roughly split into the fields of theology, history (and politics), the sciences, and poetry and plays. 17th-century term catalogues would list fictions under the second rubric of "History and politicks". The overall production of prose fictions in English remained between 1660 and 1750 at about 20–40 titles per year (including translations and reprints, the total number of titles varied from 1,000 to 2,500 titles per year during this period). Novels and romances appeared among histories of the Roman empire, party propaganda, dubious scandalous revelations, travelogues and political memoirs. The vicinity of true and fictitious materials was constantly criticized by serious historians: Fictions were "lies" and therefore hardly justifiable at all. Learned criticism was at the same moment in a precarious situation since history itself did not claim any other justification than to teach with lessons provided by examples. If one modified the examples to improve their moral value one could just as well compose fictions to instruct and delight.

Romancers and novelists responded to the argument that they spread lies with hints at Aristotle's Poetics according to which prose fiction might be just a special sort of poetry comprising productions of a high and a low genre. The modern novel could under these circumstances be called a genus medium. Romances taught through heroes and anti-heroes, novels through the very plots, the "intrigues", they related. The production of fictions remained embedded in the field of histories as the poetic principles could easily recycled and utilized in on the special market of unreliable and scandalous histories.

Prefaces and title pages of 17th and early 18th century fiction referred to a pattern of options under which fiction spread into history. Histories could claim to be romances, but threaten to relate true events. Delarivier Manley wrote the most famous of these publications with her The New Atalantis (1709), a title which alarmed the censors: The author had hawked stories discrediting the ruling Whigs, and left the discredited politicians in the dilemma to either open a libel case against Manley or to ignore the provocation – the libel case option required an acknowledgment that the stories related did actually not at all happen on the famous fairytale island Atalantis. Delarivier Manley escaped the interrogations unscathed and continued her work with three more volumes of the same ilk. Private stories appeared on the same market, creating a different genre of personal love and public battles over lost reputations.

On the other hand existed a market of titles which claimed to be strictly non-fictional, again with the two options of private and public subject matter to be distinguished. The preface to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe stated the genre-option within the pattern wit the greatest clarity: "Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention", so the formula the later prefaces repeated:

IF ever the Story of any private Man's Adventures in the World were worth making Pvblick, and were acceptable when Publish'd, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so.
     The Wonders of this Man's Life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant; the Life of one Man being scarce capable of a greater Variety.
     The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always ap[p]ly them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honor the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will.
     The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch'd [later editions: disputed], that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.[2]

Robinson Crusoe (1719) claimed to be "true history of fact" – yet it hardly appeared as such: Not only did the "editor" address readers about to discredit Crusoe. The very design of the title did not allude to a serious travelogue (nor to a novel), but to the one title educated readers throughout Europe celebrated as a "new romance":^[3] Fénelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) was a respectable prose epic rivaling if not surpassing the epics Homer and Virgil had written. Defoe's publisher overbid Fénelon's English publisher in the detailed offer he made:

The title pages of both the English edition of Fénelon's Telemachus (London: E. Curll, 1715) and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (London: W. Taylor, 1719): neither of them offer "Novels" as Aphra Behn and William Congreve had done.

Crusoe's travelogue did, at the same moment not fall into the category of rogue stories and satirical romances. The alleged author had fallen against his will into a life of otherwise romantic adventures. He had survived them as a simple sailor from York – with exemplary heroism. The title became with these promises a neighbour of the histories of similar verisimilitude which had dived into the overtly political over the past decades. Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644–1712) had become the most important author in this field with his first version of d'Artagnan's story, told again more than a century later by Alexandre Dumas the elder. Witty, and a distant precursor of Ian Fleming's fictional James Bond, is another book allegedly by his hand: La Guerre d'Espagne (1707), the story of a disillusioned French spy, who gave insight into French politics, and into his own love affairs, with little intrigues he managed wherever he had to do his jobs. Fact and fiction were mixed in all these titles, to the point that one could no longer tell where the author had invented and where he had simply betrayed secrets.

Journalists of the age defended the dubious production relying on an enlightened audience able to read with the necessary grain of skepticism if not with amusement if things became really incredible. The defendants of public morals demanded an improved production – a strictly fictitious production designed to improve the reader.

The novel as "literature": the 18th and 19th century market reform

Classics of the novel from the sixteenth century onwards: title page of A Select Collection of Novels (1720–22).

The moment for novels and romances to leave the market of potentially scandalous histories and to become "literature" (in a new sense of the word: fiction, supposedly now the best production a nation could conceive) – came in the second half of the 18th century. The development had been prepared by Pierre Daniel Huet's Traitté de l'origine des romans (1670), the short history of prose fiction which had first formulated the future canon of "literature". The French theologian had dared to praise fictions: one could interpret novels and romances and analyse them as works which uniquely reflected the cultures and times which had first produced and consumed them.

The interpretation and analysis of classics became a new practice among readers of the belles lettres. It made a vast difference whether one read romances to get lost in dream worlds (so the warning of the ancient critics against romances), whether one read them to take part in latest scandals (as readers of novels did), or whether one read the same to better understand the Greek, Roman or the Muslim frame of mind. The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (first published in Europe from 1704 to 1715 in French, and translated immediately from this edition into English and German) was immediately read as a contribution to Huet's history of romances.

Classics of the novel: a morally justified production discovers the nation

The reform of the early eighteenth century market of novels was not induced by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), a title which aroused a scandal of its own dimension with its claims of historical truth and its reprint in a newspaper edition designed to support this grotesque claim of veracity. It came with the establishment of classics of modern fiction: The early 1720s saw the edition of the English Select Collection Novels in six volumes (1720–22). It contained the finest European "novels" from Machiavelli's to Marie de LaFayette's performances. Aphra Behn's prose fictions had appeared as "novels" in the 1680s and were reprinted in collections of her works which turned the scandalous authoress into a modern classic. Fénelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) had become a classic within three years after its publication. The works of Petronius and Longos appeared in the early 18th century, equipped with prefaces which praised Huet and the elegant new audience of the "belles lettres" or "polite literature" to use the English term.

The first wave of classics of fiction was, throughout Western Europe, an international affair. Readers all over Europe read prose fiction both for its potential to create local scandal and for its readiness to explore the farthest past and life in other countries. Huet's Treatise had provided a world history of fiction, it had on the other hand inspired a comparison of novels and cultures. French novels reflected a specific French interaction of the sexes. Spanish novels followed their own standards of honour. Ancient novels gave us a picture of a civilization of fundamentally different moral standards.

The second half of the 18th century was not only marked by a reevaluation of fiction which turned the novel from lie and libel into a culturally significant production. The new evaluation hand in hand with the search for national debates capable of involving the wider public. The discussion of "literature" hosted the new debate. The spectrum of "literary" genres supplanted the old spectrum of "poetic" genres in a move designed to exclude the opera and to include prose fiction. The production in the literary genres followed, so the new theory, the development of the languages – it hence had to be rather national than international: Literature, so the new theory, developed in each language under the protection of the nation (if the nation protected its language and art). A sudden interest in the Middle Ages came along with the new formation of literature. Scottish nationalism became a topic of debate with the publication of the Ossian-"translation" in the 1760s (the translation was actually a modern English composition, the "original" epic remained lost). The modern European novel received a new past with editions of medieval romances, chapbooks and selected 17th-century romances and novels which could pose as ancestors of the present production. First histories of literature focused on the evolution of German literature in the 1830s, French histories of literature followed the new model. The first history of English literature designed to cover prose fiction and poetry under the new term of "literature" appeared in 1864 with Hippolyte Taine's Histoire de la littérature anglaise. It was immediately translated into English with a preface looking back on the recent reshaping the term literature had undergone in Germany and France. English literature as a topic in the national curriculum was a latecomer. Germany and France, the two countries who had stepped through a process of secularization at the turn from the 18th into the 19th century, had adopted the new literary heritage sooner in an attempt to define a body of texts the national school systems could teach to understand and interpret properly. Nationwide debates of literature took care of the canon of greatest works to be discussed and of interpretations these titles should find – a question of wider importance with all the interest groups who could move their own debates into the new discussion of literature.

Designed to be discussed: modern classics, 1740–1850

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741), published with open authorial intentions "to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes".

The early eighteenth-century market for classics of the novel had already inspired the first living authors to aim at personal fame on the developing market. Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker and Eliza Haywood had followed their famous French models Madame d'Aulnoy and Anne-Marguerite Petit DuNoyer and switched from anonymous to clear name publication to claim their part of the appreciation their books found. The anonymous publication had been the standard for the past centuries.

Most new novels and romances continued to be published anonymously. Authors hid and waited for the best moment appear in person. The anonymous publication created its usual suspense – what if Richardson's Pamela was not invented but a real person? The title page of Pamela or Virtue Rewarded left, however, the market Robinson Crusoe had addressed. The "narrative" which wanted to be "founded in truth and nature" was at the same moment, so the title, deliberately designed to move young readers towards better precepts of virtue. Fiction had become an accepted medium authors could be expected to use to improve morals.

Books like Richardson's Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1741), Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1759) or Rousseau's Émile, ou De l'éducation (1762) were openly published in expectation of wide debates. The novel tradition with its double titles "[...], or [...]" inspired some of the new titles to openly propose the debate the title at hand should find. The production was otherwise a swing-back into the realm of romances turning to full life accounts and a new brand of real heroes to be developed with the plots. Long performances could be published again, the short novella underwent a secret crisis before late 18th century authors revived the genre with a new production of titles extended narratives, the term "novella" was now established separate this production from epic performances.

The legitimation of fiction as part of the "belles lettres" or "literature" in the new sense of the word led to reformation of the whole market. The old divide between chapbooks and elegant books of the "belles lettres" collapsed. The old chapbooks disappeared. 19th century scholars were eager to publish the last of these titles under the assumption that they reflected the true roots of fiction in the heart of the people. "Volksbücher", books of the people, became the German and Dutch term denoting the peculiar low production. The new market divide created "literature proper" ("Literature with a capital L") with works discussed in literary journals, in school classes and university seminars, and it created a new low market with fiction "unworthy to be discussed".

The high market of works whose literary achievements attracted analytical readers became a ground on which entirely new genres could be developed. Works which played with the art of fiction, with the pure pleasure of constructing and deconstructing a narrative appeared: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy became the leading work in this new metafictional world of writing experiments.

The public debate inspired, more importantly, experiments in the character and nature of the individuals portrayed and reading these novels. The "novel of sentimentalism" discredited the early eighteenth-century heroine who had boldly protected her reputation and her personal plans the latter if necessary in the dangerous world of secret intrigues against her rivals, her parents, if not her husband. Mid-18th century heroines developed a feeling of modesty. They suffered if they had to keep secrets and felt an urge to confess. They searched for friends and intimacy, for situations in which they could freely open their hearts and speak of their deepest wishes.

Had the early 18th century punished the heroine who trusted in others – her parents would marry her off to an old man of their choice if she did not cross their plans – the world of mid-18th century fiction changed. When it came to secret wishes one was suddenly well advised to confide in parents and friends. The weak heroine was the one who met an environment of compassion. Instead of making their affairs a public entertainment, the new heroes and heroines developed an intimacy into which the novel (read by readers in privacy) alone could take a careful look.

The first wave of novels proposing the new individual (and the new caring society it needed) created female heroines. The second wave turned to men. Heroes like Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) developed weak sides. They did not become satirical heroes once they displayed these personal weaknesses, on the contrary they could as their female counterparts hope to find a world of understanding. Sympathy and pity became the ingredients of the new production of novels which claimed to finally explore the individual and its nature.

A counterculture grew with this production: a culture of new "romantic" individuals too strong, too natural to be thus severely civilized and domesticated. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was at the forefront of the new movement. The radical who could break will all norms became a role model on a market of fictions which was from now onwards supposed to reflect society with all its movements and groups.

19th century

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the novel had been a genre of realism fighting the romance with its wild fantasies. The novel had turned first to scandal before undergoing reform over the last decades of the eighteenth century. Fiction eventually became the most honourable field of literature. This development culminated in a wave of novels of fantasy at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sensibility was heightened in these novels. Women, overwrought and prone to imagining worlds beyond their appointed one, became the heroines of the new world of "romances" and "gothic novels" creating stories in distant times and places. Renaissance Italy was a favorite setting of the gothic novel.

The classic gothic novel is Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). As in other gothic novels, the notion of the sublime is central.^[4] Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was awful (literally, "awe-inspiring") and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. Gothic characters and landscapes rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine the great exception. The "beautiful" heroine's susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hypersensibility.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the overwrought emotions of sensibility, as expressed through the gothic sublime, had run their course. Jane Austen with Northanger Abbey (1803) parodied the gothic novel, reflecting its death. Moreover, while sensibility did not disappear, it was less valued. Austen introduced a different style of writing, the "comedy of manners". Her novels often are not only funny, and particularly likely to satirize individuals of high social status, but they also display a wariness of city influences which are often portrayed as having a tendency to corrupt established social values. Her best-known novel, Pride and Prejudice (1811), is her happiest, and has been a blueprint for much subsequent romantic fiction. Austen's novels still retain a wide following, despite the distance between their heroines' dilemmas and those of the reader today.

Separation of high and low production

The market for novels in the nineteenth century was clearly separated into "high" and "low" production. The new high production can best be viewed in terms of national traditions. The low production was organized rather by genres in a pattern deriving from the spectrum of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genres.

1. The novel as a literary production, promoted by critical discourse

2. Popular Fiction, not promoted by criticism

The position of authors attained its modern form with the establishment of this pattern. The modern author can either aim at a broad market or write with an eye to serious critical discussion. The borders between the realms have developed differently in different nations. While this modern market divide came relatively late to the English-speaking world, Germany and France had an earlier and much stronger interest in creating national literatures – France in the wake of the French Revolution, Germany during its mid-19th century unification. Both of these nations experienced a division between high literature — that is, the literature of ruling social group,^[5] discussed in schools and newspapers, and celebrated in public life – and a low production — not worthy to be mentioned in such circles – while the vast commercial market of the English-speaking world still resisted this artificial divide.

The novel proved to be a medium for a communication both intimate (novels can be read privately whereas plays are always a public event) and public (novels are published and thus become a matter touching the public, if not the nation, and its vital interests), a medium of a personal point of view which can get the world into its view. New modes of interaction between authors and the public reflected these developments: authors giving public readings, receiving prestigious prizes, giving interviews in the media and acting as their nations' consciences. This concept of the novelist as public figure arose in the course of the nineteenth century.

20th century

The first half of the twentieth century saw an explosion in the development of the field of literature. Entire new genres were developed, new styles of writing forged, and the number of novels being published increased almost exponentially. Modernism arose and fell out of style, and during its course notable new genre's developed and finished their evolution. J.R.R. Tolkien pioneered the modern day conception of the fantasy genre with his epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings, though the success of the novels was considered a fluke until the printing of Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara.^[6] The golden age of science fiction began in the 1950s and continued through the 1970s, and the crime novel established itself as one of the most popular forms of literature. But even more importantly, writers began to experiment more with style, and many began to openly rebel against the old standards. Post-Modernism developed out of this desire to revolt, as did minimalism, and stream of consciousness narratives. Writers began to experiment more with time and point of view and in many places a new focus arose on realism in dialogue and character. They began to try to make the way the writing itself is read take the tone of the work, adding new layers of complexity and undertones to literature.

In the second half of the 20th century, magical realism became a worldwide literary movement, mainly driven by the huge popularity of Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as other South American authors such as Jorge Borges and Carlos Fuentes. There was also more movement of the novel as being a popular artform than it had been traditionally, as literacy had always before been primarily in the upper class. In a new environment with the largest literate population in history, the novel became popularized on a large level. No longer in the form of just pulp fiction, but in the general movement of the market. Genre fiction, and low quality novels were no longer the ridiculed products of pulp fiction printers and pennydreadfuls, but were instead the driving force of the publishing industry, and attained mainstream sort of respectability as they became the main tenet of the publishing industry. Popular fiction emerged from this, encompassing many genres and attracting a wide reaching large mainstream audience.

Stream of consciousness

See Stream of Consciousness

The term 'stream of consciousness' was originally coined by philosopher William James in describing human experience and interaction with the world. Stream of consciousness as a narrative is marked by an experimentation with time, and in it characters may shift in and out of time, giving little sense of a solid, traditional narrative. Three major figures in the early half of the twentieth century were instrumental in developing the stream of consciousness narrative as a literary style. The earliest of these was the Irish novelist James Joyce, who used it in several of his novels, some of which, such as Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are ranked among the best novels of the twentieth century. Critic Robert Ruben wrote, (speaking on the role of Joyce in the emergence of stream of consciousness), "To accomplish this, Joyce invented his own technique - the stream-of-consciousness which was perhaps the most important innovation in modern literature." Joyce used it to convey a deeper, human understanding between characters despite a lack of basic communication. British novelist Virginia Woolf was also a major figure in the early development of the style, and her novel Mrs. Dalloway is a prime example of it, and she used it to experiment with time, setting the entire novel in single day, in which her character moves freely in time, removing traditional barriers, while at the same time giving her a strong and well-expressed sense of awareness of the world around her. William Faulkner is perhaps the most important example of the stream of consciousness narrative, and acheived his style by maintaining a degree of control, unlike Joyce, and his unique sensibilities. Debrah Raschke suggests that through his use of the style Faulkner purposefully broke down the narrative in order to make the reader attempt to recreate what was broken, and that by denying his characters a firm ground to narrate upon he leaves the reader in a state of uncertainty. This embodies the essence of the style, that through writing something in a different way, from a new angle, it can change and define the substance of the novel.

Modernism

See Modernist literature

Post-Modernism

See Post-Modernism

Fantasy

Main article: Fantasy

Although pre-dated by John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River (1841), the history of modern fantasy literature is usually said to begin with George MacDonald, the Scottish author of such novels as The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes (1858), the latter of which is widely considered to be the first fantasy novel ever written for adults. MacDonald was a major influence on both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The other major fantasy author of this era was William Morris, a popular English poet who wrote several novels in the latter part of the century, including The Well at the World's End.

Despite MacDonald's future influence with At the Back of the North Wind (1871), and Morris's popularity with his contemporaries, it wasn't until the turn of the century that fantasy fiction began to reach a large audience. Edward Plunkett, better known as Lord Dunsany, established the genre's popularity in both the novel and the short story form. Many popular mainstream authors also began to write fantasy at this time, including H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These authors, along with Abraham Merritt, established what was known as the "lost world" sub-genre, which was the most popular form of fantasy in the early decades of the 20th century, although several classic children's fantasies, such as Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, were also published around this time.

In the 1950s, the "sword and sorcery" subgenre of fantasy had begun to find a wide audience with the success of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.^[7] However, it was the advent of "epic" or "high fantasy" showcased by J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s that allowed fantasy to truly enter the mainstream.^[8] Several other series, such as C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, helped cement the genre's popularity.

By the mid 1970s, fantasy had begun to decline with the advent of the new horror genre. The biggest decline was found in high fantasy, which had not seen any book approach the success of The Lord of the Rings. However, this all changed in 1977, with the release of Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara. The critic David Pringle credited Brooks for "demonstrat[ing] in 1977 that the commercial success of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings had not been a fluke, and that fantasy really did have the potential to become a mass-market genre".^[6] Together with Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, The Sword of Shannara ushered in "the era of the big commercial fantasy"^[9] and helped to make epic fantasy the leading subgenre of fantasy.^[9]

At the present, fantasy is still popular across many different forms of media, with novels such as the posthumously published The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by Christopher Tolkien, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire or J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, movies such as The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, or role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons or Final Fantasy.

Minimalism

See Minimalism

Science fiction

See Science Fiction

See also

Notes

Further reading

Contemporary views

• 1651: Paul Scarron, The Comical Romance, Chapter XXI. "Which perhaps will not be found very Entertaining" (London, 1700). Scarron's plea for a French production rivalling the Spanish "Novels". Marteau
• 1670: Pierre Daniel Huet, "Traitté de l'origine des Romans", Preface to Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne comtesse de La Fayette, Zayde, histoire espagnole (Paris, 1670). A world history of fiction. pdf-edition Gallica France
• 1683: [Du Sieur], "Sentimens sur l’histoire" from: Sentimens sur les lettres et sur l’histoire, avec des scruples sur le stile (Paris: C. Blageart, 1680). The new novels as published masterly by Marie de LaFayette. Marteau
• 1702: Abbe Bellegarde, "Lettre à une Dame de la Cour, qui lui avoit demandé quelques Reflexions sur l’Histoire" aus: Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale (La Haye: Adrian Moetjens, 1702). Paraphrase of Du Sieur's text. Marteau
• 1705/1708/1712: [Anon.] In English, French and German the Preface of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (Albigion, 1705). Bellegarde's article plagiarised. Marteau
• 1713: Deutsche Acta Eruditorum, German review of the French translation of Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis 1709 (Leipzig: J. L. Gleditsch, 1713). A rare example of a political novel discussed by a literary journal. Marteau
• 1715: Jane Barker, preface to her Exilius or the Banish’d Roman. A New Romance (London: E. Curll, 1715). Plea for a "New Romance" following Fénlon's Telmachus. Marteau
• 1718: [Johann Friedrich Riederer], "Satyra von den Liebes-Romanen", from: Die abentheuerliche Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kappe, 2 ([Nürnberg,] 1718). German satire about the wide spread reading of novels and romances. Marteau
• 1742: Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews (London, 1742). The "comic epic in prose" and its poetics. Munseys

Secondary literature

• Erwin Rohde Der Griechesche Roman und seine Vorläufer (1876) [un-superseded history of the ancient novel] (German)
• Lukács, Georg (1971, 1916). The Theory of the Novel. trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. ISBN 0-262-12048-8. 
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981. [written during the 1930s]
• Watt, Ian (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of Los Angeles Press. ISBN 0-520-23069-8.  Watt reads Robinson Crusoe as the first modern "novel" and interprets the rise of the modern novel of realism as an achievement of English literature, owed to a number of factors from early capitalism to the development of the modern individual.
• Burgess, Anthony (1963). The Novel To-day. London: Longmans, Green. 
• Burgess, Anthony (1967). The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction. London: Faber. 
• Ben Edwin Perry The Ancient Romances (Berkeley, 1967) review: [3]
• Richetti, John J. (1969). Popular Fiction before Richardson. Narrative Patterns 1700-1739. Oxford: OUP. ISBN. 
• Burgess, Anthony (1970). "Novel, The" – classic Encyclopædia Britannica entry.
• Miller, H. K., G. S. (1970) Rousseau and Eric Rothstein, The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). ISBN 0-19-811697-7
• Arthur Ray Heiserman The Novel Before the Novel (Chicago, 1977) ISBN 0226325725
• Madden, David; Charles Bane, Sean M. Flory (2006) [1979]. A Primer of the Novel: For Readers and Writers (revised ed. ed.). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-5708-1.  Updated edition of pioneering typology and history of over 50 genres; index of types and technique, and detailed chronology.
• Spufford, Magaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London, 1981).
• Davis, Lennard J. (1983). Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-05420-3. 
• Spencer, Jane, The Rise of Woman Novelists. From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford, 1986).
• Armstrong, Nancy (1987). Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504179-8. 
• McKeon, Michael (1987). The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-3291-8. 
• Hunter, J. Paul (1990). Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-02801-1. 
• Ballaster, Ros (1992). Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684-1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-811244-0. 
• Doody, Margaret Anne (1996). The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2168-8. 
• Relihan, Constance C. (ed.), Framing Elizabethan fictions: contemporary approaches to early modern narrative prose (Kent, Ohio/ London: Kent State University Press, 1996). ISBN 0873385519
• Reconsidering The Rise of the Novel: Eighteenth Century Fiction, Volume 12, Number 2-3, ed. David Blewett (January-April 2000).
• McKeon, Michael, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
• Simons, Olaf (2001). Marteaus Europa, oder, Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde: eine Untersuchung des Deutschen und Englischen Buchangebots der Jahre 1710 bis 1720. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN 90-420-1226-9.  A market study of the novel around 1700 interpreting contemporary criticism.
• Price, Leah (2003). The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53939-0.  from Leah Price
• Rousseau, George (2004). Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). ISBN 1-4039-3454-1
• Mentz, Steve, Romance for sale in early modern England: the rise of prose fiction (Aldershot [etc.]: Ashgate, 2006). ISBN 0-7546-5469-9
• Schultz, Lydia, "Flowing against the traditional stream: consciousness in Tillie Olsen's 'Tell Me a Riddle.'" Melus, 1997.
• Rubens, Robert, "A hundred years of fiction: 1896 to 1996. (The English Novel in the Twentieth Century, part 12)." Contemporary Review, December 1996.
• Anderson, John Dennis, "Student Companion to William Faulkner". Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. ISBN 0313334390
• To view three contemporary experimental novels, see http://bradmusil.kramernet.org