Novel
Encyclopedia
A novel is a book of long narrative
in literary prose
. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance
and in the tradition of the novella
. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century.
Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality
is created in the works of fiction
, the fascination of the character
study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history
. The individualism
of the presentation makes the personal memoir
and the autobiography
the two closest relatives among the genres of modern histories.
The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
ality and the presentation in a narrative
are the two features most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. In a historical perspective they are problematic criteria. Histories were supposed to be narrative projects throughout the early modern period
. Their authors could include inventions as long as they were rooted in traditional knowledge or in order to orchestrate a certain passage. Historians would thus invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political, and personal realities of a place and period with a clarity and detail historians would not dare to explore.
The line between history and novel is eventually drawn between the debates novelists and historians are supposed to address in the West and wherever the Western pattern of debates has been introduced: Novels are supposed to show qualities of literature
and art
. Histories are by contrast supposed to be written in order to fuel a public debate over historical responsibilities. A novel can hence deal with history. It will be analyzed, however, with a look at the almost timeless value it is supposed to show in the hands of private readers as a work of art.
The critical demand is a source of constant argument: Does the specific novel have these "eternal qualities" of art, this "deeper meaning
" an interpretation
tries to reveal? The debate itself had positive effects. It allowed critics to cherish fictions that are clearly marked as such. The novel is not a historical forgery
, it does not hide the fact that it was made with a certain design. The word novel can appear on book cover
s and title page
s; the artistic effort
or the sheer suspense
created can find a remark in a preface
or on the blurb
. Once it is stated that this is a text whose craftsmanship we should acknowledge literary critics will be responsible for the further discussion. The new responsibility (historians were the only qualified critics up into the 1750s) made it possible to publicly disqualify much of the previous fictional production: Both the early 18th-century roman à clef
and its fashionable counterpart, the nouvelle historique, had offered narratives with – by and large scandalous – historical implications. Historians had discussed them with a look at facts they had related. The modern literary critic
who became responsible for fictions in the 1750s offered a less scandalous debate: A work is "literature", art, if it has a personal narrative
, heroes
to identify
with, fictional invention
s, style
and suspense – in short anything that might be handled with the rather personal ventures of creativity
and artistic freedom
. It may relate facts with scandalous accuracy, or distort them; yet one can ignore any such work as worthless if it does not try to be an achievement in the new field of literary works – it has to compete with works of art and invention, not with true histories. The new scandal is if it fails to offer literary merits.
Historians reacted and left much of their own previous "medieval" and "early modern" production to the evaluation of literary critics. New histories discussed public perceptions of the past – the decision that turned them into the perfect platform on which one can question historical liabilities in the West. Fictions, allegedly an essentially personal subject matter, became, on the other hand, a field of materials that call for a public interpretation: they became a field of cultural significance to be explored with a critical and (in the school system) didactic interest in the subjective perceptions both of artists and their readers.
of southern France. Novel(la)s as those Geoffrey Chaucer
presented in his The Canterbury Tales
appeared in verse much later. A number of famous 19th-century fictional narratives such as Lord Byron's
Don Juan
(1824) and Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin
(1833) competed with the moderne prose novels of their time and employed verse. It is hence problematic to call prose a decisive criterion. Prose did, however, become the standard of the modern novel – thanks to a number of advantages it had over verse once the question of the carrier medium was solved.
Prose is easier to translate. As rather initimate and informal language prose won the market of European fiction in the 15th century, a time at which books first became widely available, and immediately developed a special style with models both in Greek and Roman histories and the traditions of verse narratives wherever an elevated style was needed. The development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that did not aim at forging history but at works readers would actually identify and appreciate as fictions.
This is for the early modern period
closely connected to the development of elegance in the belles lettres. With the beginning of the 16th century the printed market had created a special demand for books that were neither simply published for the non academic audience nor explicitly scientific literature – but. The belles lettres became this field as a compound of genres including modern history and science in the vernaculars, personal memoirs, present political scandal, fiction and poetry. Prose fiction was in this wider spectrum soon the driving force creating the distinct style as it allowed the artistic experiment and the personal touch of the author who could market his or her style as a fashion. Verse, rhetoric and science were by contrast highly restricted areas. Fictional prose remained close to everyday language, to the private letter, to the art of "gallant" conversation, to the personal memoir and travelogue.
18th-century authors eventually criticized the French ideals of elegance the belles lettres had promoted. A less aristocratic style of English reformed novels became the ideal in the 1740s. The requirements of style changed again in the 1760s when prose fiction became part of the newly formed literary production. The more normal it became to open novels with a simple statement of their fictionality (for example by labelling them as "a novel"), the less interesting it became to imitate true histories with an additional touch of style. Novels of the 1760s such as Sterne
's Tristram Shandy began to explore prose fiction as an experimental field. Novels of the ensuing romantic period played with the fragment and open-endedness. Modern late 19th century and early 20th century fiction continued the deconstruction attacking the clear author-reader communication and developing models of texts to be evaluated as such. Modern literary criticism acted in the experimental field as a constant provider of historical models. Authors who write fiction gain critical attention as soon as they search a position in future histories of literature, whether as innovators or traditionalists. The situation is – in a historical perspective – new: An awareness of traditions has only grown after the publication of Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances
(1670). It has reached the public only with greater impact since the 1830s.
s, the shortest form of prose narratives still circulating in oral traditions).
Extended prose fictions needed paper to preserve their complex compositions. Parchment
had been available before the 1450s, but remained too expensive to be used for histories one would read as a private diversion. Parchment was used for prestigious and presentable volumes of verse epics their owners would have recited on festive occasions (see the Troilus and Criseyde illustration below). Prose was otherwise the language of scientific books. Parchments would in their case be bought by libraries. The situation changed in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries when prose legends became fashionable among the female urban elite. The fact that the new audience would read these books again and again for inspirational purposes legitimated the use of parchment in the private context.
The availability of paper as a carrier medium changed the situation for prose fiction. Paper allowed the production of cheap books one would not necessarily read twice, books one would buy exclusively for one's private diversion. The modern novel developed with the new carrier medium in Europe in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. The arrival of the printed book pushed the generic development as it created a special tension between the privacy of the reading act and the publicity of the reading material that was sold in larger editions. The formats duodecimo and octavo
(or small quarto
in the case of chapbooks) immediately created books one could read privately at home or in public without the support of a table. To read novels in coffee houses or on journeys became part of the early modern reading culture. The reader who immerses him- or herself in the novel with the wish to stay undisturbed (or to be disturbed only with a look at his or her present reading) is here an early modern precursor of the modern commuter reading a novel or putting on head phones with the intention to stay private in the public. A special content matter immediately explored the new reading situations.
Individualistic fashions, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct" and "gallantry" spread with novels. Love became the typical field of experience romances and novels would focus on, as Huet noted in his early definition: "I call them Fictions, to discriminate them from True Histories; and I add, of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the Principal Subject of Romance". Satirical fictions widened the range of subject matter in the 17th and 18th centuries. The reader is invited to personally identify with the novel's characters (while historians are supposed to aim at neutrality and a public view on whatever they discuss).
The reviewing of fiction changed the situation for the fictional work in the course of the 18th century. It created a public discussion about what people were actually reading in novels. It had at the same moment the potential to divide the market into a sphere to be discussed and a low production critics would only hint at. The subcultures of trivial fiction and of genres to be sold under the counter with pornography
as its most influential field followed the arrival of literary criticism in the 1740s and 1750s.
The question how long a novel has to be – in order to be more than a novella – is of practical importance as most of the literary awards have developed a ranking system in which length is also a criterion of importance. The Booker Prize has thus aroused a serious debate with its 2007 listing of Ian McEwan
's On Chesil Beach
. Critics immediately stated that McEwan had at best written a novella.
The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that epic length performances try to cope with the "totality of life". The novella is by contrast focused on a point, the short story on a situation whose full dimensions the reader has to grasp in a complex process of interpretation.
novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin
novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". Most European languages have preserved the term "romance" (as in French, German, Croatian and Swedish "Roman", and in Portuguese "Romance") for extended narratives.
The English and Spanish decisions came with the 17th-century fashion of shorter exemplary histories. See the chapters "Petites histoires" or "novels", 1600–1740 and The words "novel" and "romance" in the following.
A significant number of extended fictional prose works predate the novel, and have been cited as its antecedents. While these anticipate the novel in form and, to some extent, in substance, the early European novelists were unaware of most of these works; instead they were influenced by novellas and verse epics.
Early works of extended fictional prose include the 6th/7th-century Daśakumāracarita by Daṇḍin
, the 7th-century Kadambari
by Banabhatta
, the 11th-century Tale of Genji
by Murasaki Shikibu
, the 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
(or Philosophus Autodidactus, the 17th-century Latin title) by Ibn Tufail
, the 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, and the 14th-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms
by Luo Guanzhong
.
Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji (1010) shows essentially all the qualities for which works such as Marie de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves
(1678) have been praised: individuality of perception, an interest in character development and psychological observation. Urbanization and the spread of printed books in Song Dynasty
China led to the evolution of oral storytelling into consciously fictional novels
by the Ming dynasty. Parallel European developments did not occur for centuries, and awaited the time when the availability of paper allowed similar opportunities for composition and reception, allowing explorations of individualistic subject matter. By contrast, Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus are works of didactic philosophy and theology rather than private reading pleasure in the style of popular Western novels. In this sense, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan would be considered an early example of a philosophical novel
, while Theologus Autodidactus would be considered an early theological novel. Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is also likely to have influenced Daniel Defoe
with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island (the work was available in a new edition shortly before Defoe began his composition).
Western traditions of the modern novel reach back into the field of verse epics, though again not in an unbroken tradition. The Sumer
ian Epic of Gilgamesh
(1300–1000 BC), Indian epics
such as the Ramayana
(400 BCE and 200 CE) and Mahabharata
(4th century BC) were as unknown in early modern Europe as the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf
(c. 750–1000 rediscovered in the late 18th century and early 19th century).
Homer
's Iliad
and Odyssey
(9th or 8th century BC), Virgil
's Aeneid
(29–19 BC) were read by Western scholars since the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 18th century, modern French prose translations brought Homer to a wider public, who accepted them as forerunners of the modern novel.
Ancient prose narratives included a didactic strand with Plato
's dialogs, a satirical with Petronius
' Satyricon
, the incredible stories of Lucian of Samosata, and Lucius Apuleius' proto-picaresque The Golden Ass
and a heroic production with the romances of Heliodorus
and Longus
.
It is less easy to define the traditions of short fictions that led to the medieval novella. Jokes would fall into the broad history of the "exemplary story" that gave rise to the more complex forms of novelistic story telling. The Bible
is filled with similes and stories to be interpreted. Fiction is, as Pierre Daniel Huet
noted in his Traitté de l'origine des romans
in 1670, a rather universal phenomenon, and at the same moment one that lacks a single cause.
The problem of roots is matched by a problem of branches: the inventions of paper and movable type
helped isolated genres come together into a single market of exchange and awareness. The first languages of this new market were Spanish, French, German, Dutch and English. The rise of the United States, Russia, Scandinavia and Latin America broadened the spectrum in the 19th century. A later wave of new literatures brought forth Asian and African novelists. The novel has become a global medium of national awareness, surrounded and encouraged in each country by a complex of literary criticism and literary awards. The relatively late emergence of the Latin American or African novel does not necessarily indicate lagging cultural progress leading only at a late date to the individuality that brought forth the modern novel: it may just as easily reflect late arrival of such necessary material factors as print, paper, and a marketplace.
The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted in the tradition of medieval "romances". Even today, most European languages make that clear by using the word roman roughly the way that English uses the word novel, which claims roots in the Italian novella. Yet, epic length or the focus on a central hero giving the work its name (as in Robinson Crusoe or Oliver Twist) are features derived from the tradition of "romances". The early modern novel had preferred titles that focused on curious examples of modern life, not on heroes.
The word roman or romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of the 13th century, as in the Roman de la Rose
(c. 1230), famous today in English through Geoffrey Chaucer
's late 14th-century translation. The term linked fictions back to the histories that had appeared in the Romance language of 11th and 12th-century southern France. The central subject matter was initially derived from Roman and Greek historians. Works of the Chanson de geste
tradition revived the memory of ancient Thebes
, Dido and Aeneas
, and Alexander the Great. German and Dutch adaptations of the famous histories appeared in the late 12th century and early 13th century. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
(1380–87) is a late example of this European fashion.
The subject matter which was to become the central theme of the genre in the 16th and 17th centuries was initially a branch of a broader genre. Arthurian
histories became a fashion in the late 12th century thanks to their ability to glorify the northern European feudal system as an independent cultural achievement. The works of Chrétien de Troyes
set an example, in that his plot construction subjected the northern European epic traditions to ancient Greek aesthetics. The typical Arthurian romance would focus on a single hero and lead him into a double course of episodes in which he would prove both his prowess as an independent knight and his readiness to function as a perfect courtier under King Arthur. The model invited religious redefinitions with the quest
and the adventure
as basic plot elements: the quest was a mission the knight would accept as his personal task and problem. Adventures (from Latin advenire "coming towards you") were tests sent by God to the knight on the journey, whose course he (the knight) would no longer try to control. The plot framework survived into the world of modern Hollywood movies which still unite, separate and reunite lovers in the course of adventures designed to prove their love and value. Variations kept the genre alive: unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(c. 1380). Satirical parodies of knight errantry
(and contemporary politics) appeared with works such as Heinrich Wittenwiler
's Ring (c. 1410).
The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century. The Prose Lancelot
or Vulgate Cycle includes passages of that period. The collection indirectly lead to Thomas Malory
's Le Morte d'Arthur
compilation of the early 1470s.
Several factors made prose increasingly attractive: this "low" style was less prone to potentially annoying exaggerations; it linked the popular plots to the field of serious histories traditionally composed in prose (compilations such as Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur claimed to collect historical sources for the sole purpose of instruction and national edification). Prose had an additional advantage for translators, who could go directly for meaning, where verse had to be translated by people skilled as poets in the target language. And prose survived language changes: developments such as the Great vowel shift
changed almost all the European languages during the 14th and 15th centuries. Copyists of prose had an easy job to deal with these shifts while those who copied verses saw that rhymes had broken and syllables got lost in almost every second line.
Prose became the medium of the urban commercial book market in the 15th century. Monasteries sold edifying collections of saints' and virgins' lives composed in prose. The customers were mostly women (the interiors of many of the 14th- and 15th-century paintings of the annunciation
show how far books had spread into the urban households that painters usually depicted as the blessed virgin's
bourgeois environment.) Prose became in this environment the medium of silent and private reading. It spread with the commercial book market that began to provide such reading materials even before the arrival of the first commercial printed histories in the 1470s.
The term novel refers back to the production of short stories that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, little funny stories designed to make a point in a conversation, the exemplum a priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of examples designed for the use of clerics to such poetic cycles as Boccaccio
's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer
's Canterbury Tales (1386–1400).
The early modern genre conflict between "novels" and "romances" can be traced back to the 14th-century cycles. The standard scheme of stories the author claimed to have heard in a round of narrators promised variety of subject matter and it led to clashes of genres. Short romances appeared within the frame tales side by side with stories of the rivalling lower genres such as the fabliaux. Individual story tellers would openly defend their tastes in a debate that grew into a metafiction
al consideration.
The cycles themselves showed advantages over the production of rival extended epic-length romances. Romances presupposed a consensus in questions of style and heroism. The cycles shifted the problem of how fictions were to be justified onto the level of the individual storytellers: onto a level the author, Chaucer or Boccaccio, would see as out of his control. The narrators had, so Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, offered these stories to make certain points in a lively conversation he had only chronicled. They attacked each other if they felt the stories of their opponents had missed their points. A competition among the genres developed. If one believes the medieval collections, differing tastes of people with different social statuses were decisive; the different professions fought a battle over precedent with satirical plots designed to ridicule individuals of the opposing trades. A cycle bound rival stories together and it offered the easiest way to keep a critical distance. The pluralistic discourse created here eventually developed into the 17th- and 18th-century debate of fiction and its genres.
Much of this original conception of the genre is still alive whenever a short joke is told to make a certain humorous point in everyday conversation. The longer exploits left the sphere of oral traditions with the arrival of the printing press. The book eventually replaced the story teller and introduced the preface
and the dedication
as the paratext
s in which the authors would continue the metafictional debate over the advantages of genres and the reasons why one published and read fictional stories.
histories, mentalities seem to differ. The Enlightenment
seems to separate the 21st-century observer from early modern authors and readers of histories and fictions. The grossest improbabilities pervade many historical accounts found in the early modern print market. William Caxton
's 1485 edition of Thomas Malory
's Le Morte d'Arthur
(1471) was sold as a true history, though the story unfolded in a series of magical incidents and historical improbabilities. Witchcraft pervaded the medieval romance, which no one read as "romance" as long as it claimed to be a central text of Great Britain's national memory. Sir John Mandeville's Voyages, written in the 14th century, circulated in printed editions throughout the 18th century, and was filled with natural wonders like the one-footed Ethiopians who use their extremity as an umbrella against the desert sun – again without becoming the subject of critical historical debates. Both works eventually came to be viewed as works of literature, fiction. The realm of history grew around 1700 into a field of comparatively sober argumentative rather than narrative projects.
One can interpret this development as a sign of gradual enlightenment. It stands at the same moment for a new arrangement of discourses the Western nations established beginning with the 1660s. History became in the Western world a secular platform on which all parties, religions, and institutions agree to settle questions of unresolved responsibilities. Historical commissions such as the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission
are temporarily established whenever conflicts call for historical decisions. Debates of state and religion had a comparable importance until the beginning of the 18th century. A new positioning of the sciences and a general interest of the 19th-century nation states in controllable and pluralistic secular debates stand behind the process that found its breakthrough with the American
and the French
revolutions and the 19th-century unification of Germany
.
The transformation of history from a narrative project designed to instruct and to delight into a platform of open controversies is the one larger process which redefined the place of prose fiction since the Middle Ages. The creation of "literature" as a compound of poetry and fiction is the other. The modern nations won with literature a second field of essentially pluralistic controversies in which the interpretation and collective appreciation of texts gained a new and wider importance.
Two major incidents fuelled the separation of historical and fictional literature in the 16th and 17th centuries. The invention of printing immediately created a new market of comparatively cheap entertainment and knowledge – the market of chapbooks. The more elegant production 17th- and 18th-century authors would propagate as the belles lettres – a market that would be neither low nor academic – defined its ideals of style in the course of the 17th century. It became the wider sphere in which the modern ensemble of "literary genres" of poetry and fiction gained greater cohesion in late 18th century. The second major development is fixed to a single title: The Spanish Amadis de Gaula
, by García Montalvo became the first best-seller of modern fiction – a title one would soon be reluctant to accept as part of the elegant belles lettres. The Amadis eventually became the archetypical "romance" against which the modern novel unfolded its successful wider pattern of genres in the 17th century.
lization and commercialization. Romances had circulated in lavishly ornamented manuscripts to be read out to audiences. The printed book allowed a comparatively inexpensive alternative for the special purpose of silent reading. Abridgements of ancient historians, popular medieval histories of knights, stories of comical heroes, religious legends and collections of jests and fables were the principal historical subject matter. Offering suspense and stories the audience could accept as allegedly true, even if they were fantastic and unlikely, the new books reached the households of urban citizens and of country merchants who visited the cities as traders.
Literacy
spread among the urban populations of Europe due to a number of factors: Women of wealthier households had learned to read in the 14th and 15th centuries and had become customers of religious devotion. The Protestant Reformation
enkindled propaganda and press wars that lasted into the 18th century. Broadsheet
s and newspaper
s became the new media of public information. The early modern customers would not necessarily be able to write, yet even writing skills spread among apprentices and women of the middle classes. Business owners were forced to adopt methods of written book-keeping and accounting. The personal letter became a favourite medium of communication among 17th-century men and women as many Dutch period paintings show. The prefaces, the escapist subject matter, and a number of satires on the early consumption of fiction show that cheap histories were especially popular among apprentices and younger urban readers of both sexes. Norris' and Bettesworth's 1719 edition of The Seven Famous Champions of Christendom
– itself a mixture of legend and romance – ended with a look on the entire spectrum of books the publishers would provide in their shops on London Bridge
, a famous location where those who left the city provided themselves with reading materials:
The new market was disregarded by scholars. The texts were offered with promises of great erudition – to an audience that would not know to distinguish between erudition and the misleading advertisement. The subject matter was extremely conservative. The bestsellers of this market – books like Till Eulenspiegel
, The Seven Wise Masters
, Don Belianis of Greece
, Dr. Faustus, The London Prentice, or Sir John Mandeville
's Voyages – went through innumerable editions between 1500 and 1800. People bought these books because though they were everything but modern and fashionable; one wanted to have them, because they were the books everyone had heard of, books of an eternal value to be chosen if one was not too sure about one's abilities to judge. The prefaces exploited these insecurities praising the solid value of the old and well known titles.
The design of these books deteriorated. The texts were copied without much editorship. Standard woodcut
illustrations were repeated, often even within a single book, wherever the plot allowed such repetition. The illustrations began to show peculiar style mixes as the printer's stocks grew: Early 18th-century editions of 16th-century titles would mix woodcuts of 16th-century knights in armor with equally crude depictions 18th-century courtiers wearing wigs.
The early modern market divide that created a field of low chapbooks and an alternative market segment of expensive fashionable, elegant belles lettres can be traced back into the 1530s and 1540s. The Amadis and Rablais
' Gargantua and Pantagruel
were the most important publications that lead into this divide – both books that specifically addressed the new customers of popular histories. The Amadis was a multi volume fictional history of style, so the advertisements, and aroused a debate of style and elegance as it fanned the first reading craze on the market of printed fiction. Gargantua and Pantagruel had the design of the modern popular history only to satirize its stylistic achievements. The ensuing debate created a gap between "truly elegant" fictions and the conservative bulk of chapbooks. The market divide became especially visible with books that appeared on both markets in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries: The low market eventually included abridgments of classy books from Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605/1615) to the mutilations of Daniel Defoe
's Robinson Crusoe
(1719), which infuriated the author with their claim to offer the entire plot without the tedious reflections for but half the price.
The cheap abridgments openly addressed an audience that neither had the money nor the courage to buy books with engravings and fine print. The prefaces of the abridgements promised shorter sentences, more action and less reflection, and the title for half the money. The gradual differentiation between fact and fiction that affected the market of the belles lettres in the 17th and 18th centuries barely touched the low market. One could wonder whether the apprentices and peasants who read such books cared about the status King Arthur
, St. George or Julius Caesar
had in the historian's eye. William Caxton
's preface to Thomas Malory
's Le Morte d'Arthur
(1485) set the tone that would allow Sir John Mandeville's Voyages of the 1360s to continue to be published as a true account of Eastern wonders until the end of the 18th century.
By the 1550s there existed a section of literature (scientific books) addressing the academic audience and a second market of books for the wider audience. The popular second market developed its own differentiation of class and style. While the lowest strata of chapbooks created an extremely conservative market its antagonist the elegant "belles lettres" showed a particular design aiming at educated readers of both sexes, though not necessarily at academics. The very term "belles lettres" spoke of the ambition to leave the field of low books and to reach the realm of the sciences, "literature", "les lettres". Polite literature, galante Wissenschaften (that is sciences addressing both sexes and all readers of taste) were the English and German terminological equivalents. The use of a French loan word belles lettres marked the international aspect of the development. The new market segment comprised poetry, memoirs, modern politics, books of fashion, journals, and such. Autobiographical memoirs, personal journals and prose fiction set the trend in the modern field as the genres that authors could most freely use for experiments of style and personal expression.
The evolution of prose fiction needed the elegant market, a market of changing styles and fashions, and it found its central critical debate with the publication of the Amadis de Gaula
in the 1530s. Two questions moved into the centre of the debate as Spanish, French and German translations and imitations flooded the European market. The first was a question of style and fashion: the Amadis had moved back into the Arthurian Middle Ages, into a world of quests, knights and adventures, though it had turned its princes and princesses into paragons of style and elegance. Was this what one had to expect of modern prose fiction? The second problem was connected with the unprecedented public reaction: the Amadis became the object of a widespread reading craze. Could a market of style and distinguished taste allow such a development?
By 1600 the Amadis had become the detested epitome of the modern romance. A search for alternative subject matters had begun. The biographies of Greek and Roman historians became the most important source here. Heliodorus
' romances were to be followed in matters of style and composition, while the heroes turned from knights to princes and princesses acting now in ancient courts. The standard plot of adventures gave way to a new plot of love facing intrigues, attacks, rivalry and adversity. A new art of character observation unfolded.
The works that gained the greatest fame – Honoré d'Urfé
's L'Astrée (1607–27), John Barclay's Argenis (1625–26), Madeleine de Scudéry
"s ‚Clelie or Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig's
Römischer Octavia (Octavia the Roman, 1679–1714) – were esteemed both as explorations of the ancient world and as works one would read with an interest in modern life. They encapsulated present histories clad in ancient costumes and dove into the realm of the roman à clef
, the novel readers would decipher with a key that betrayed who was who within this fictional world. The present fashions of courtly conduct could in the event be found nowhere in such perfection as in these seemingly historical romances. Readers used them as models for their own elegant compliments, letters, and speeches.
The genre had much in common with the production of French and Italian operas in the same period. It found trivializations with a special brand of escapist "Asian" Romances which led into the ancient empires of Assyria, Persia, India. The latter were particularly fashionable among urban female French and German readers of the younger generation, who would dream of sharing the escapes of princesses from all sorts of adversities. The individual European markets reacted differently on these fashions. The craving had a particularly short life in England where it began in the 1650s only to end in the 1670s, as these romantic plots fell out of fashion.
Stories of witty cheats were an integral part of the European novella with its tradition of fabliaux. Several collections knitted such stories to individual heroes who developed personal and national features. Germany's Till Eulenspiegel
(1510) was the hero of chapbooks in and outside Germany. The Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes
(1554) represented a transition from a collection of episodes towards the story of the life of a central character, the hero of the work. Grimmelshausen
's Simplicissimus Teutsch
(1666–1668) took a further step along this path, as its hero experienced recent world history, in this case the history of the Thirty Years' War
that had devastated Germany. Richard Head
's The English Rogue (1665) is rooted in this tradition (the English preface mentions the precedents; the German translation that appeared in 1672 sold the book as an English equivalent of the German Simplicissimus). The tradition that developed with these titles focused on a hero and his life. The adventures led to satirical encounters with the real world with the hero either becoming the pitiable victim or the rogue who exploited the vices of those he met.
A second tradition of satirical romances can be traced back to Heinrich Wittenwiler
's Ring (c. 1410) and to François Rabelais
' Gargantua and Pantagruel
(1532–1564). It was rather designed to parody and satirize heroic romances, and did this mostly by dragging them into the low realm of the burlesque. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1606/1615) modified the satire of romances: its hero lost contact with reality by reading too many romances in the Amadisian tradition.
Both branches of satirical production seem to have addressed a predominantly male audience (women are despicable victims in titles like Head's The English Rogue). They found the appreciation of critics as long as they revealed the weaknesses of the Amadis. The critics otherwise deplored that the satires could not offer alternatives. Other important works of the tradition are Paul Scarron
's Roman Comique (1651–57) with its explicit discussions of the market of fictions, the anonymous French Rozelli with its satire on Europe's religions, Alain-René Lesage
's Gil Blas
(1715–1735), Henry Fielding
's Joseph Andrews
(1742) and Tom Jones
(1749), and Denis Diderot
's Jacques the Fatalist (1773, printed posthumously in 1796).
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The term novel – today in a twisted history (see below) connected with the appearance of Daniel Defoe
's Robinson Crusoe
(1719) – has been present on the market since the 16th century. William Painter
's Palace of Pleasure well furnished with pleasaunt Histories and excellent Novelles (1566) was the first English title to use it. Compared with "romances", "novelles", "novellas" or "novels" (all these words meant the same, "novel" became the standard term in the 1650s) had to be short. They had to give up all aspirations on grandeur, heroism and the style romantic heroes and their actions required. "Romances" focused on lonely heroes and their adventures, "novels" on revealing incidents that could serve as examples for moral maxims. The titles of "romances" put their respective heroes' and heroines' names front and centre: "Artamene", "Clelie" were the heroes of "heroic romances". "Satirical romances" did the same with their lower class protagonists. The additional "Adventures of" would later emphasize the focus on acts of heroism. The titles of "novels" preferred a two part formula "[...] or [...]" in order to state the value of the incident related. William Congreve
's Incognita or Love and Duty Reconcil'd (1692) was typical in this respect. The protagonists of "novels" were actors in a plot, in an intrigue, and it was the plot that gave the example and taught the vital lessons. These protagonists could be average human beings without any special signs of grandeur, neither comical nor imitable but of the same nature as their readers; they would by and large show problematic character traits. Unlike romances, the protagonists were not role models: instead, the surprising results of their actions taught the lessons.
The rise of the "novel" as the major alternative to the antiquated "romance" began with the publication of Cervantes
Novelas Exemplares
(1613). It unfolded with Scarron
's Roman Comique, whose heroes noted a rivalry of French "romances" and the new Spanish genre. France had to find, Scarron wrote at the time, its own brand of short stories.
Late 17th-century critics looked back onto the history of prose fiction proud of the generic shift towards the modern novel/novella. A wave of "petites histoires" or "nouvelles historiques" had replaced the old romances. The first perfect works in French were those of Scarron and Madame de La Fayette's "Spanish history" Zayde (1670). The development finally led to her Princesse de Clèves
(1678), the first novel with what would become characteristic French subject matter (Marie de LaFayette's authorship remained a secret, though, over the next decades).
Europe witnessed the generic shift with the titles Dutch francophone publishers supplied on the international market. English publishers exploited the novel/romance controversy in the 1670s and 1680s. The word "novel" began to replace the word "romance" on title pages in the 1680s. Contemporary critics listed the advantages of the new genre: brevity, a lack of ambition to produce epic poetry in prose. The style was fresh and plain; the focus was on modern life and on heroes who were neither good nor bad. One learned through their actions, not by imitating them. The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip and scandal fuelled the rise of the novel/novella. The authors of modern journalistic gossip spiced their works with short anonymous histories. The stories were offered as allegedly true recent histories, not for the sake of scandal but strictly for the moral lessons they gave. To prove this, one would read fictionalized names (and read the true names in separate keys). The Mercure Gallant set the fashion in the 1670s. Collections of letters and memoirs appeared, and were filled with the intriguing new subject matter. The epistolary novel
grew on this market and found its first full blown example of scandalous fiction with Aphra Behn
's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
(1684/ 1685/ 1687).
The development did not lead to Robinson Crusoe – a work that was almost provocatively (both in 1719 when it appeared and still in the 1760s) a new "romance", thanks to its exotic setting and thanks to its singular hero offering a story of survival in isolation. Crusoe lacked almost all the amenities of the new "novels": wit, a fast narration evolving around a group of young fashionable urban heroes and their intrigues, a scandalous moral, gallant talk to be imitated and brevity and conciseness of the plot. The development did, however, lead to Eliza Haywood
's epic length "novel" Love in Excess (1719/20) and to Samuel Richardson
's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741), essentially still a novel with its typical two part title: naming the story and promising its value as an example. It led to a production of classics of the intriguing production and to a reform movement in the 1740s.
The entire market of early modern fiction remained part of the wider production of (potentially dubious) histories. A market of "literature" in the modern sense of the word, a market of fiction and poetry, did not exist. "History and politicks" was the rubric early 18th-century Term Catalogue
s had in stock for the entire production of pamphlet
s, memoir
s, travel literature
, political analysis, serious histories, romances and novels.
That fictional histories could share the same space with academic histories and modern journalism had been criticized by historians since the end of the Middle Ages: fictions were "lies" and therefore hardly justifiable at all. The climate had, however, changed, in the 1670s. Paradoxically, the same historians who pleaded for a new era of academic research also pleaded for fiction to stay within the field of histories. The authors who advocated Pyrrhonism
, scepticism as a historical discipline, did not demand that fictions change. Instead, they demanded that historians should step from the old project of historical narratives to a new project of critical analysis and discussion of sources. Pierre Bayle
exemplified this with all the articles of his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique
(1697) and with his statements on the legitimacy of fictions, especially those of the modern political market.
The new novels, romances and dubious histories, the quasi historical and yet immensely readable works of the Madame d'Aulnoy
, César Vichard de Saint-Réal
, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras
, and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, were, according to the modern advocates of the free press, not only embedded in the field of veritable critical histories: they had an important function to fulfill in that field. In a time when factuality was not a sufficient defence against a libel suit, the romantic lay out allowed the publication of histories that could not risk an unambiguous assertion of their truth. The question was not whether one should separate the markets of true and fictional histories from each other but whether one would be able to establish critical discourses to evaluate all the interesting production.
The market of the late 17th century and early 18th century employed a simple pattern of options of how fictions could both be part of the historical production and reach out into the sphere of true histories. The fringes of this pattern flourished as cheap excuses. They allowed it authors to claim they had published fiction, not truth, if they ever faced outright allegations of libel:
Heroical Romances:
Fénelon's Telemach (1699)
Probably not that factual
1
Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of public affairs:
Manley's The New Atalantis (1709)
2
Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of private affairs:
Menantes' Satyrischer Roman (1706)
3.2
Classics of the novel from the Arabian Nights to M. de La Fayette's Princesse de Clèves (1678)
4
Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention:
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719)
5
Sold as true public history, risking to be read as romantic invention:
La Guerre d'Espagne (1707)
3.3
Satirical Romances:
Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605)
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
in literary prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance
Romance (genre)
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
and in the tradition of the novella
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century.
Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality
Reality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
is created in the works of fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
, the fascination of the character
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
. The individualism
Individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...
of the presentation makes the personal memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
and the autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
the two closest relatives among the genres of modern histories.
Definition
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The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
A fictional narrative
FictionFiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
ality and the presentation in a narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
are the two features most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. In a historical perspective they are problematic criteria. Histories were supposed to be narrative projects throughout the early modern period
Early modern period
In history, the early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the Middle Ages through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions...
. Their authors could include inventions as long as they were rooted in traditional knowledge or in order to orchestrate a certain passage. Historians would thus invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political, and personal realities of a place and period with a clarity and detail historians would not dare to explore.
The line between history and novel is eventually drawn between the debates novelists and historians are supposed to address in the West and wherever the Western pattern of debates has been introduced: Novels are supposed to show qualities of literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
and art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
. Histories are by contrast supposed to be written in order to fuel a public debate over historical responsibilities. A novel can hence deal with history. It will be analyzed, however, with a look at the almost timeless value it is supposed to show in the hands of private readers as a work of art.
The critical demand is a source of constant argument: Does the specific novel have these "eternal qualities" of art, this "deeper meaning
Meaning (linguistics)
In linguistics, meaning is what is expressed by the writer or speaker, and what is conveyed to the reader or listener, provided that they talk about the same thing . In other words if the object and the name of the object and the concepts in their head are the same...
" an interpretation
Interpretation (aesthetics)
An interpretation in philosophy of art, is an explanation of the meaning of some work of art. An interpretation expresses an understanding of a work of art, a poem, performance, or piece of literature.- One or many :...
tries to reveal? The debate itself had positive effects. It allowed critics to cherish fictions that are clearly marked as such. The novel is not a historical forgery
Literary forgery
Literary forgery refers to writing, such as a manuscript or a literary work either deliberately misattributed to a historical or invented author, or a purported memoir presented as genuine.- History :The common, or popularly known, instance of literary forgery may involve for example the work of a...
, it does not hide the fact that it was made with a certain design. The word novel can appear on book cover
Book cover
A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. Beyond the familiar distinction between hardcovers and paperbacks, there are further alternatives and additions, such as dust jackets, ring-binding, and older forms such as the nineteenth-century "paper-boards" and...
s and title page
Title page
The title page of a book, thesis or other written work is the page at or near the front which displays its title and author, usually together with information relating to the publication of the book...
s; the artistic effort
Literary merit
Literary merit is a quality generally applied to the genre of literary fiction. A work is said to have literary merit if it is a work of quality, that is if it has some aesthetic value....
or the sheer suspense
Suspense
Suspense is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience's perceptions in a dramatic work. Suspense is not exclusive to fiction, though. Suspense may operate in any situation where there is a lead-up to a big event or dramatic...
created can find a remark in a preface
Preface
A preface is an introduction to a book or other literary work written by the work's author. An introductory essay written by a different person is a foreword and precedes an author's preface...
or on the blurb
Blurb
A blurb is a short summary or some words of praise accompanying a creative work, usually used on books without giving away any details, that is usually referring to the words on the back of the book jacket but also commonly seen on DVD and video cases, web portals, and news websites.- History :The...
. Once it is stated that this is a text whose craftsmanship we should acknowledge literary critics will be responsible for the further discussion. The new responsibility (historians were the only qualified critics up into the 1750s) made it possible to publicly disqualify much of the previous fictional production: Both the early 18th-century roman à clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
and its fashionable counterpart, the nouvelle historique, had offered narratives with – by and large scandalous – historical implications. Historians had discussed them with a look at facts they had related. The modern literary critic
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
who became responsible for fictions in the 1750s offered a less scandalous debate: A work is "literature", art, if it has a personal narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
, heroes
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
to identify
Identification (literature)
Identification is a term used in literary and film studies to describe a psychological relationship between the reader of a novel and a character in the book, or between a spectator in the audience and a character on screen...
with, fictional invention
Invention
An invention is a novel composition, device, or process. An invention may be derived from a pre-existing model or idea, or it could be independently conceived, in which case it may be a radical breakthrough. In addition, there is cultural invention, which is an innovative set of useful social...
s, style
Style (fiction)
In fiction, style is the manner in which the author tells the story. Along with plot, character, theme, and setting, style is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction.-Fiction-writing modes:...
and suspense – in short anything that might be handled with the rather personal ventures of creativity
Creativity
Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...
and artistic freedom
Artistic freedom
Artistic freedom is the extent of freedom of an artist to produce art to his/her own insight. The extent can deviate to customs in a certain school of art, directives of the assigner, etc....
. It may relate facts with scandalous accuracy, or distort them; yet one can ignore any such work as worthless if it does not try to be an achievement in the new field of literary works – it has to compete with works of art and invention, not with true histories. The new scandal is if it fails to offer literary merits.
Historians reacted and left much of their own previous "medieval" and "early modern" production to the evaluation of literary critics. New histories discussed public perceptions of the past – the decision that turned them into the perfect platform on which one can question historical liabilities in the West. Fictions, allegedly an essentially personal subject matter, became, on the other hand, a field of materials that call for a public interpretation: they became a field of cultural significance to be explored with a critical and (in the school system) didactic interest in the subjective perceptions both of artists and their readers.
Distinct literary prose
The first so called "romances" had been verse epics in the Romance languageRomance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
of southern France. Novel(la)s as those Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
presented in his The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. The tales are told as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at...
appeared in verse much later. A number of famous 19th-century fictional narratives such as Lord Byron's
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS , commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement...
Don Juan
Don Juan (Byron)
Don Juan is a satiric poem by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womanizer but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire"...
(1824) and Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin
Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin.It is a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes . It was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832...
(1833) competed with the moderne prose novels of their time and employed verse. It is hence problematic to call prose a decisive criterion. Prose did, however, become the standard of the modern novel – thanks to a number of advantages it had over verse once the question of the carrier medium was solved.
Prose is easier to translate. As rather initimate and informal language prose won the market of European fiction in the 15th century, a time at which books first became widely available, and immediately developed a special style with models both in Greek and Roman histories and the traditions of verse narratives wherever an elevated style was needed. The development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that did not aim at forging history but at works readers would actually identify and appreciate as fictions.
This is for the early modern period
Early modern period
In history, the early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the Middle Ages through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions...
closely connected to the development of elegance in the belles lettres. With the beginning of the 16th century the printed market had created a special demand for books that were neither simply published for the non academic audience nor explicitly scientific literature – but. The belles lettres became this field as a compound of genres including modern history and science in the vernaculars, personal memoirs, present political scandal, fiction and poetry. Prose fiction was in this wider spectrum soon the driving force creating the distinct style as it allowed the artistic experiment and the personal touch of the author who could market his or her style as a fashion. Verse, rhetoric and science were by contrast highly restricted areas. Fictional prose remained close to everyday language, to the private letter, to the art of "gallant" conversation, to the personal memoir and travelogue.
18th-century authors eventually criticized the French ideals of elegance the belles lettres had promoted. A less aristocratic style of English reformed novels became the ideal in the 1740s. The requirements of style changed again in the 1760s when prose fiction became part of the newly formed literary production. The more normal it became to open novels with a simple statement of their fictionality (for example by labelling them as "a novel"), the less interesting it became to imitate true histories with an additional touch of style. Novels of the 1760s such as Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
's Tristram Shandy began to explore prose fiction as an experimental field. Novels of the ensuing romantic period played with the fragment and open-endedness. Modern late 19th century and early 20th century fiction continued the deconstruction attacking the clear author-reader communication and developing models of texts to be evaluated as such. Modern literary criticism acted in the experimental field as a constant provider of historical models. Authors who write fiction gain critical attention as soon as they search a position in future histories of literature, whether as innovators or traditionalists. The situation is – in a historical perspective – new: An awareness of traditions has only grown after the publication of Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances
Traitté de l'origine des romans
Pierre Daniel Huet's Trai[t]té de l'origine des Romans can claim to be the first history of fiction. It was originally published in 1670 as preface to Marie de la Fayette's novel Zayde. The following will give extended excerpts from the English translation by Stephen Lewis published in 1715...
(1670). It has reached the public only with greater impact since the 1830s.
Media requirements: Paper and print
The evolution of prose fiction required cheap carrier media. Unlike verse, prose can hardly be remembered with precision. Oral traditions had helped prose narrators with stock narrative patterns as employed in fairy tales and with complex plot structures, whose point they could only reach if they told the story correctly (the novels of Boccaccio and Chaucer share this mode of construction with modern jokeJoke
A joke is a phrase or a paragraph with a humorous twist. It can be in many different forms, such as a question or short story. To achieve this end, jokes may employ irony, sarcasm, word play and other devices...
s, the shortest form of prose narratives still circulating in oral traditions).
Extended prose fictions needed paper to preserve their complex compositions. Parchment
Parchment
Parchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned; therefore, it is very...
had been available before the 1450s, but remained too expensive to be used for histories one would read as a private diversion. Parchment was used for prestigious and presentable volumes of verse epics their owners would have recited on festive occasions (see the Troilus and Criseyde illustration below). Prose was otherwise the language of scientific books. Parchments would in their case be bought by libraries. The situation changed in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries when prose legends became fashionable among the female urban elite. The fact that the new audience would read these books again and again for inspirational purposes legitimated the use of parchment in the private context.
The availability of paper as a carrier medium changed the situation for prose fiction. Paper allowed the production of cheap books one would not necessarily read twice, books one would buy exclusively for one's private diversion. The modern novel developed with the new carrier medium in Europe in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. The arrival of the printed book pushed the generic development as it created a special tension between the privacy of the reading act and the publicity of the reading material that was sold in larger editions. The formats duodecimo and octavo
Octavo
Octavo to is a technical term describing the format of a book.Octavo may also refer to:* Octavo is a grimoire in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett...
(or small quarto
Quarto
Quarto could refer to:* Quarto, a size or format of a book in which four leaves of a book are created from a standard size sheet of paper* For specific information about quarto texts of William Shakespeare's works, see:...
in the case of chapbooks) immediately created books one could read privately at home or in public without the support of a table. To read novels in coffee houses or on journeys became part of the early modern reading culture. The reader who immerses him- or herself in the novel with the wish to stay undisturbed (or to be disturbed only with a look at his or her present reading) is here an early modern precursor of the modern commuter reading a novel or putting on head phones with the intention to stay private in the public. A special content matter immediately explored the new reading situations.
Special content: The novel's intricate intimacy
Whether in 11th-century Japan or 15th-century Europe, prose fiction tended to develop intimate reading situations. Verse epics had been recited to selected audiences (see the Troilus and Criseyde illustration below), a reception that had already allowed a greater intimacy than the performance of plays in theatres. The late medieval commercial manuscript production created a market of private books, yet it still required the customer to contact the professional copyist with the book he or she wanted to have copied (see the Melusine illustration below) – a situation that again restricted the development of more private reading experiences. The invention of the printing press anonymised the bookseller-text-reader constellation – the situation was especially interesting for prose fiction, a subject matter that remained publicly undiscussed almost throughout the early modern period. Booksellers and readers could pretend far into the 18th century not to know more about the particular title the new market of printed books provided. If one wanted to know what others read in novels one had to read them oneself. Prose fiction became in this situation the medium of open secrets, rumours, private and public gossip, a private, unscientific and irrelevant reading matter, yet one of public relevance as one could openly see that the book one was reading had reached the public as part of a larger edition.Individualistic fashions, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct" and "gallantry" spread with novels. Love became the typical field of experience romances and novels would focus on, as Huet noted in his early definition: "I call them Fictions, to discriminate them from True Histories; and I add, of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the Principal Subject of Romance". Satirical fictions widened the range of subject matter in the 17th and 18th centuries. The reader is invited to personally identify with the novel's characters (while historians are supposed to aim at neutrality and a public view on whatever they discuss).
The reviewing of fiction changed the situation for the fictional work in the course of the 18th century. It created a public discussion about what people were actually reading in novels. It had at the same moment the potential to divide the market into a sphere to be discussed and a low production critics would only hint at. The subcultures of trivial fiction and of genres to be sold under the counter with pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
as its most influential field followed the arrival of literary criticism in the 1740s and 1750s.
Length and the epic depiction of life
The requirement of length is contested – in English with greater ferocity than in other languages. It rests on the consensus that the novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose, followed by the novella and the short story. The sequence has been unstable: 17th-century critics had handled the romance as the epic length performance and privileged the novel as its short rival.The question how long a novel has to be – in order to be more than a novella – is of practical importance as most of the literary awards have developed a ranking system in which length is also a criterion of importance. The Booker Prize has thus aroused a serious debate with its 2007 listing of Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"....
's On Chesil Beach
On Chesil Beach
On Chesil Beach is a 2007 novel by the Booker Prize-winning British writer Ian McEwan. The novel was selected for the 2007 Booker Prize shortlist....
. Critics immediately stated that McEwan had at best written a novella.
The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that epic length performances try to cope with the "totality of life". The novella is by contrast focused on a point, the short story on a situation whose full dimensions the reader has to grasp in a complex process of interpretation.
Etymology
The present English (and Spanish) word derives from the ItalianItalian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". Most European languages have preserved the term "romance" (as in French, German, Croatian and Swedish "Roman", and in Portuguese "Romance") for extended narratives.
The English and Spanish decisions came with the 17th-century fashion of shorter exemplary histories. See the chapters "Petites histoires" or "novels", 1600–1740 and The words "novel" and "romance" in the following.
Antecedents around the world
Early works of extended fictional prose include the 6th/7th-century Daśakumāracarita by Daṇḍin
Dandin
Dandin can refer to:* Daṇḍin, 6th-7th century Sanskrit writer* The Dandin Group, a wireless internet thinktank* Dandin the Sword Carrier, a character appearing in Mariel of Redwall and The Bellmaker, two books from the fictional Redwall series by Brian Jacques....
, the 7th-century Kadambari
Kadambari
Kādambari is a romantic novel in Sanskrit. It was substantially composed by Bānabhatta in the first half of the 7th century, who did not survive to see it through completion. The novel was completed by Banabhatta's son Bhushanabhatta, according to the plan laid out by his late father...
by Banabhatta
Banabhatta
Bāṇabhaṭṭa , also known as Bāṇa, was a Sanskrit scholar and poet of India. He was the Asthana Kavi in the court of King Harshavardhana, who reigned in the years c. 606–647 CE in north India...
, the 11th-century Tale of Genji
The Tale of Genji
is a classic work of Japanese literature attributed to the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century, around the peak of the Heian period. It is sometimes called the world's first novel, the first modern novel, the first psychological novel or the first novel still to be...
by Murasaki Shikibu
Murasaki Shikibu
Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court during the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji, written in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012...
, the 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān is an Arabic philosophical novel and allegorical tale written by Ibn Tufail in the early 12th century.- Translations :* from Wikisource* English translations of Hayy bin Yaqzan...
(or Philosophus Autodidactus, the 17th-century Latin title) by Ibn Tufail
Ibn Tufail
Ibn Tufail was an Andalusian Muslim polymath: an Arabic writer, novelist, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, vizier,...
, the 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, and the 14th-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written by Luo Guanzhong in the 14th century, is a Chinese historical novel based on the events in the turbulent years near the end of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history, starting in 169 and ending with the reunification of the land in...
by Luo Guanzhong
Luo Guanzhong
Luo Ben , better known by his style name Luo Guanzhong , was a Chinese writer of the early Ming Dynasty period of Chinese history. He was also known as Huhai Sanren...
.
Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji (1010) shows essentially all the qualities for which works such as Marie de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves
La Princesse de Clèves
La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It is regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel, and as a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette.The action takes place between...
(1678) have been praised: individuality of perception, an interest in character development and psychological observation. Urbanization and the spread of printed books in Song Dynasty
Song Dynasty
The Song Dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a...
China led to the evolution of oral storytelling into consciously fictional novels
Four Great Classical Novels
The Four Great Classical Novels, or the Four Major Classical Novels of Chinese literature, are the four novels commonly regarded by scholars to be the greatest and most influential of pre-modern Chinese fiction. Dating from the Ming and Qing dynasties, they are well known to most Chinese readers...
by the Ming dynasty. Parallel European developments did not occur for centuries, and awaited the time when the availability of paper allowed similar opportunities for composition and reception, allowing explorations of individualistic subject matter. By contrast, Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus are works of didactic philosophy and theology rather than private reading pleasure in the style of popular Western novels. In this sense, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan would be considered an early example of a philosophical novel
Philosophical novel
Philosophical fiction refers to works of fiction in which a significant proportion of the work is devoted to a discussion of the sort of questions normally addressed in discursive philosophy. These might include the function and role of society, the purpose of life, ethics or morals, the role of...
, while Theologus Autodidactus would be considered an early theological novel. Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is also likely to have influenced Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island (the work was available in a new edition shortly before Defoe began his composition).
Western traditions of the modern novel reach back into the field of verse epics, though again not in an unbroken tradition. The Sumer
Sumer
Sumer was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age....
ian Epic of Gilgamesh
Epic of Gilgamesh
Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from Mesopotamia and is among the earliest known works of literature. Scholars believe that it originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems about the protagonist of the story, Gilgamesh king of Uruk, which were fashioned into a longer Akkadian epic much...
(1300–1000 BC), Indian epics
Indian epic poetry
Indian epic poetry is the epic poetry written in the Indian subcontinent, traditionally called Kavya . The Ramayana and Mahabharata, originally composed in Sanskrit and translated thereafter into many other Indian languages, are some of the oldest surviving epic poems on earth and form part of...
such as the Ramayana
Ramayana
The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic. It is ascribed to the Hindu sage Valmiki and forms an important part of the Hindu canon , considered to be itihāsa. The Ramayana is one of the two great epics of India and Nepal, the other being the Mahabharata...
(400 BCE and 200 CE) and Mahabharata
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....
(4th century BC) were as unknown in early modern Europe as the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf
Beowulf
Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...
(c. 750–1000 rediscovered in the late 18th century and early 19th century).
Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
's Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
and Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
(9th or 8th century BC), Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
's Aeneid
Aeneid
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...
(29–19 BC) were read by Western scholars since the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 18th century, modern French prose translations brought Homer to a wider public, who accepted them as forerunners of the modern novel.
Ancient prose narratives included a didactic strand with Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's dialogs, a satirical with Petronius
Petronius
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.-Life:...
' Satyricon
Satyricon
Satyricon is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as a certain Titus Petronius...
, the incredible stories of Lucian of Samosata, and Lucius Apuleius' proto-picaresque The Golden Ass
The Golden Ass
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, which St. Augustine referred to as The Golden Ass , is the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety....
and a heroic production with the romances of Heliodorus
Heliodorus of Emesa
Heliodorus of Emesa, from Emesa, Syria, was a Greek writer generally dated to the third century AD who is known for the ancient Greek novel or romance called the Aethiopica or sometimes "Theagenes and Chariclea"....
and Longus
Longus
Longus, sometimes Longos , was the author of an ancient Greek novel or romance, Daphnis and Chloe. Very little is known of his life, and it is assumed that he lived on the isle of Lesbos during the 2nd century AD...
.
It is less easy to define the traditions of short fictions that led to the medieval novella. Jokes would fall into the broad history of the "exemplary story" that gave rise to the more complex forms of novelistic story telling. The Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
is filled with similes and stories to be interpreted. Fiction is, as Pierre Daniel Huet
Pierre Daniel Huet
Pierre Daniel Huet was a French churchman and scholar, editor of the Delphin Classics, founder of the Academie du Physique in Caen and Bishop of Soissons from 1685 to 1689 and afterwards of Avranches.-Life:...
noted in his Traitté de l'origine des romans
Traitté de l'origine des romans
Pierre Daniel Huet's Trai[t]té de l'origine des Romans can claim to be the first history of fiction. It was originally published in 1670 as preface to Marie de la Fayette's novel Zayde. The following will give extended excerpts from the English translation by Stephen Lewis published in 1715...
in 1670, a rather universal phenomenon, and at the same moment one that lacks a single cause.
The problem of roots is matched by a problem of branches: the inventions of paper and movable type
Movable type
Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
helped isolated genres come together into a single market of exchange and awareness. The first languages of this new market were Spanish, French, German, Dutch and English. The rise of the United States, Russia, Scandinavia and Latin America broadened the spectrum in the 19th century. A later wave of new literatures brought forth Asian and African novelists. The novel has become a global medium of national awareness, surrounded and encouraged in each country by a complex of literary criticism and literary awards. The relatively late emergence of the Latin American or African novel does not necessarily indicate lagging cultural progress leading only at a late date to the individuality that brought forth the modern novel: it may just as easily reflect late arrival of such necessary material factors as print, paper, and a marketplace.
Romances, 1000–1500
The word roman or romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of the 13th century, as in the Roman de la Rose
Roman de la Rose
The Roman de la rose, , is a medieval French poem styled as an allegorical dream vision. It is a notable instance of courtly literature. The work's stated purpose is to both entertain and to teach others about the Art of Love. At various times in the poem, the "Rose" of the title is seen as the...
(c. 1230), famous today in English through Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
's late 14th-century translation. The term linked fictions back to the histories that had appeared in the Romance language of 11th and 12th-century southern France. The central subject matter was initially derived from Roman and Greek historians. Works of the Chanson de geste
Chanson de geste
The chansons de geste, Old French for "songs of heroic deeds", are the epic poems that appear at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known examples date from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, nearly a hundred years before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the trouvères and...
tradition revived the memory of ancient Thebes
Ancient Thebes (Boeotia)
See Thebes, Greece for the modern city built on the ancient ruins.Ancient Thebes was a Boeotian city-state , situated to the north of the Cithaeron range, which divides Boeotia from Attica, and on the southern edge of the Boeotian plain...
, Dido and Aeneas
Aeneas
Aeneas , in Greco-Roman mythology, was a Trojan hero, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. His father was the second cousin of King Priam of Troy, making Aeneas Priam's second cousin, once removed. The journey of Aeneas from Troy , which led to the founding a hamlet south of...
, and Alexander the Great. German and Dutch adaptations of the famous histories appeared in the late 12th century and early 13th century. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war in the Siege of Troy. It was composed using rime royale and probably completed during the mid 1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it...
(1380–87) is a late example of this European fashion.
The subject matter which was to become the central theme of the genre in the 16th and 17th centuries was initially a branch of a broader genre. Arthurian
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
histories became a fashion in the late 12th century thanks to their ability to glorify the northern European feudal system as an independent cultural achievement. The works of Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes was a French poet and trouvère who flourished in the late 12th century. Perhaps he named himself Christian of Troyes in contrast to the illustrious Rashi, also of Troyes...
set an example, in that his plot construction subjected the northern European epic traditions to ancient Greek aesthetics. The typical Arthurian romance would focus on a single hero and lead him into a double course of episodes in which he would prove both his prowess as an independent knight and his readiness to function as a perfect courtier under King Arthur. The model invited religious redefinitions with the quest
Quest
In mythology and literature, a quest, a journey towards a goal, serves as a plot device and as a symbol. Quests appear in the folklore of every nation and also figure prominently in non-national cultures. In literature, the objects of quests require great exertion on the part of the hero, and...
and the adventure
Adventure
An adventure is defined as an exciting or unusual experience; it may also be a bold, usually risky undertaking, with an uncertain outcome. The term is often used to refer to activities with some potential for physical danger, such as skydiving, mountain climbing and or participating in extreme sports...
as basic plot elements: the quest was a mission the knight would accept as his personal task and problem. Adventures (from Latin advenire "coming towards you") were tests sent by God to the knight on the journey, whose course he (the knight) would no longer try to control. The plot framework survived into the world of modern Hollywood movies which still unite, separate and reunite lovers in the course of adventures designed to prove their love and value. Variations kept the genre alive: unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his...
(c. 1380). Satirical parodies of knight errantry
Knight-errant
A knight-errant is a figure of medieval chivalric romance literature. "Errant," meaning wandering or roving, indicates how the knight-errant would typically wander the land in search of adventures to prove himself as a knight, such as in a pas d'armes.The first known appearance of the term...
(and contemporary politics) appeared with works such as Heinrich Wittenwiler
Heinrich Wittenwiler
Heinrich Wittenwiler was a late medieval Alemannic poet . He is the author of a satirical poem entitled The Ring . He may be identical to an advocate to the bishop of Konstanz, mentioned in 1395. Heinrich may be of the family of the former rulers of Wittenwil in the Thurgau, who became destitute...
's Ring (c. 1410).
The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century. The Prose Lancelot
Lancelot-Grail
The Lancelot–Grail, also known as the Prose Lancelot, the Vulgate Cycle, or the Pseudo-Map Cycle, is a major source of Arthurian legend written in French. It is a series of five prose volumes that tell the story of the quest for the Holy Grail and the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere...
or Vulgate Cycle includes passages of that period. The collection indirectly lead to Thomas Malory
Thomas Malory
Sir Thomas Malory was an English writer, the author or compiler of Le Morte d'Arthur. The antiquary John Leland as well as John Bale believed him to be Welsh, but most modern scholars, beginning with G. L...
's Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur is a compilation by Sir Thomas Malory of Romance tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table...
compilation of the early 1470s.
Several factors made prose increasingly attractive: this "low" style was less prone to potentially annoying exaggerations; it linked the popular plots to the field of serious histories traditionally composed in prose (compilations such as Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur claimed to collect historical sources for the sole purpose of instruction and national edification). Prose had an additional advantage for translators, who could go directly for meaning, where verse had to be translated by people skilled as poets in the target language. And prose survived language changes: developments such as the Great vowel shift
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in England between 1350 and 1500.The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen , a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term....
changed almost all the European languages during the 14th and 15th centuries. Copyists of prose had an easy job to deal with these shifts while those who copied verses saw that rhymes had broken and syllables got lost in almost every second line.
Prose became the medium of the urban commercial book market in the 15th century. Monasteries sold edifying collections of saints' and virgins' lives composed in prose. The customers were mostly women (the interiors of many of the 14th- and 15th-century paintings of the annunciation
Annunciation
The Annunciation, also referred to as the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary or Annunciation of the Lord, is the Christian celebration of the announcement by the angel Gabriel to Virgin Mary, that she would conceive and become the mother of Jesus the Son of God. Gabriel told Mary to name her...
show how far books had spread into the urban households that painters usually depicted as the blessed virgin's
Mary (mother of Jesus)
Mary , commonly referred to as "Saint Mary", "Mother Mary", the "Virgin Mary", the "Blessed Virgin Mary", or "Mary, Mother of God", was a Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee...
bourgeois environment.) Prose became in this environment the medium of silent and private reading. It spread with the commercial book market that began to provide such reading materials even before the arrival of the first commercial printed histories in the 1470s.
The tradition of the novella, 1200–1600
Giovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...
's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
's Canterbury Tales (1386–1400).
The early modern genre conflict between "novels" and "romances" can be traced back to the 14th-century cycles. The standard scheme of stories the author claimed to have heard in a round of narrators promised variety of subject matter and it led to clashes of genres. Short romances appeared within the frame tales side by side with stories of the rivalling lower genres such as the fabliaux. Individual story tellers would openly defend their tastes in a debate that grew into a metafiction
Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
al consideration.
The cycles themselves showed advantages over the production of rival extended epic-length romances. Romances presupposed a consensus in questions of style and heroism. The cycles shifted the problem of how fictions were to be justified onto the level of the individual storytellers: onto a level the author, Chaucer or Boccaccio, would see as out of his control. The narrators had, so Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, offered these stories to make certain points in a lively conversation he had only chronicled. They attacked each other if they felt the stories of their opponents had missed their points. A competition among the genres developed. If one believes the medieval collections, differing tastes of people with different social statuses were decisive; the different professions fought a battle over precedent with satirical plots designed to ridicule individuals of the opposing trades. A cycle bound rival stories together and it offered the easiest way to keep a critical distance. The pluralistic discourse created here eventually developed into the 17th- and 18th-century debate of fiction and its genres.
Much of this original conception of the genre is still alive whenever a short joke is told to make a certain humorous point in everyday conversation. The longer exploits left the sphere of oral traditions with the arrival of the printing press. The book eventually replaced the story teller and introduced the preface
Preface
A preface is an introduction to a book or other literary work written by the work's author. An introductory essay written by a different person is a foreword and precedes an author's preface...
and the dedication
Dedication
Dedication is the act of consecrating an altar, temple, church or other sacred building. It also refers to the inscription of books or other artifacts when these are specifically addressed or presented to a particular person. This practice, which once was used to gain the patronage and support of...
as the paratext
Paratext
Paratext is a concept in literary interpretation. The main text of published authors is often surrounded by other material supplied by editors, printers, and publishers, which is known as the paratext. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or...
s in which the authors would continue the metafictional debate over the advantages of genres and the reasons why one published and read fictional stories.
Before literature: The early market of printed books, 1470–1720
Looking back to the scope of early modernEarly modern period
In history, the early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the Middle Ages through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions...
histories, mentalities seem to differ. The Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
seems to separate the 21st-century observer from early modern authors and readers of histories and fictions. The grossest improbabilities pervade many historical accounts found in the early modern print market. William Caxton
William Caxton
William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...
's 1485 edition of Thomas Malory
Thomas Malory
Sir Thomas Malory was an English writer, the author or compiler of Le Morte d'Arthur. The antiquary John Leland as well as John Bale believed him to be Welsh, but most modern scholars, beginning with G. L...
's Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur is a compilation by Sir Thomas Malory of Romance tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table...
(1471) was sold as a true history, though the story unfolded in a series of magical incidents and historical improbabilities. Witchcraft pervaded the medieval romance, which no one read as "romance" as long as it claimed to be a central text of Great Britain's national memory. Sir John Mandeville's Voyages, written in the 14th century, circulated in printed editions throughout the 18th century, and was filled with natural wonders like the one-footed Ethiopians who use their extremity as an umbrella against the desert sun – again without becoming the subject of critical historical debates. Both works eventually came to be viewed as works of literature, fiction. The realm of history grew around 1700 into a field of comparatively sober argumentative rather than narrative projects.
One can interpret this development as a sign of gradual enlightenment. It stands at the same moment for a new arrangement of discourses the Western nations established beginning with the 1660s. History became in the Western world a secular platform on which all parties, religions, and institutions agree to settle questions of unresolved responsibilities. Historical commissions such as the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission
International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission
The International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission was a body appointed by the Holy See's Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews in 1999. With three Jewish and three Catholic scholars, the group evaluated Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre...
are temporarily established whenever conflicts call for historical decisions. Debates of state and religion had a comparable importance until the beginning of the 18th century. A new positioning of the sciences and a general interest of the 19th-century nation states in controllable and pluralistic secular debates stand behind the process that found its breakthrough with the American
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
and the French
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
revolutions and the 19th-century unification of Germany
Unification of Germany
The formal unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation state officially occurred on 18 January 1871 at the Versailles Palace's Hall of Mirrors in France. Princes of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm of Prussia as Emperor Wilhelm of the German...
.
The transformation of history from a narrative project designed to instruct and to delight into a platform of open controversies is the one larger process which redefined the place of prose fiction since the Middle Ages. The creation of "literature" as a compound of poetry and fiction is the other. The modern nations won with literature a second field of essentially pluralistic controversies in which the interpretation and collective appreciation of texts gained a new and wider importance.
Two major incidents fuelled the separation of historical and fictional literature in the 16th and 17th centuries. The invention of printing immediately created a new market of comparatively cheap entertainment and knowledge – the market of chapbooks. The more elegant production 17th- and 18th-century authors would propagate as the belles lettres – a market that would be neither low nor academic – defined its ideals of style in the course of the 17th century. It became the wider sphere in which the modern ensemble of "literary genres" of poetry and fiction gained greater cohesion in late 18th century. The second major development is fixed to a single title: The Spanish Amadis de Gaula
Amadis de Gaula
Amadis de Gaula is a landmark work among the knight-errantry tales which were in vogue in 16th century Iberian Peninsula, and formed the earliest reading of many Renaissance and Baroque writers, although it was written at the onset of the 14th century.The first known printed edition was published...
, by García Montalvo became the first best-seller of modern fiction – a title one would soon be reluctant to accept as part of the elegant belles lettres. The Amadis eventually became the archetypical "romance" against which the modern novel unfolded its successful wider pattern of genres in the 17th century.
Trivializations: Chapbooks, 1470–1800
The invention of printing subjected the existing field of histories – whether allegedly true, romantic or novel – to a process of triviaTrivia
The trivia are the three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the topics of basic education, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the material of basic education, of interest only to undergraduates...
lization and commercialization. Romances had circulated in lavishly ornamented manuscripts to be read out to audiences. The printed book allowed a comparatively inexpensive alternative for the special purpose of silent reading. Abridgements of ancient historians, popular medieval histories of knights, stories of comical heroes, religious legends and collections of jests and fables were the principal historical subject matter. Offering suspense and stories the audience could accept as allegedly true, even if they were fantastic and unlikely, the new books reached the households of urban citizens and of country merchants who visited the cities as traders.
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
spread among the urban populations of Europe due to a number of factors: Women of wealthier households had learned to read in the 14th and 15th centuries and had become customers of religious devotion. The Protestant Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
enkindled propaganda and press wars that lasted into the 18th century. Broadsheet
Broadsheet
Broadsheet is the largest of the various newspaper formats and is characterized by long vertical pages . The term derives from types of popular prints usually just of a single sheet, sold on the streets and containing various types of material, from ballads to political satire. The first broadsheet...
s and newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
s became the new media of public information. The early modern customers would not necessarily be able to write, yet even writing skills spread among apprentices and women of the middle classes. Business owners were forced to adopt methods of written book-keeping and accounting. The personal letter became a favourite medium of communication among 17th-century men and women as many Dutch period paintings show. The prefaces, the escapist subject matter, and a number of satires on the early consumption of fiction show that cheap histories were especially popular among apprentices and younger urban readers of both sexes. Norris' and Bettesworth's 1719 edition of The Seven Famous Champions of Christendom
Seven Champions of Christendom
The Seven Champions of Christendom is a moniker referring to St. George, St. Andrew, St. Patrick, St. Denis, St. James Boanerges, St. Anthony the Lesser, and St. David...
– itself a mixture of legend and romance – ended with a look on the entire spectrum of books the publishers would provide in their shops on London Bridge
London Bridge
London Bridge is a bridge over the River Thames, connecting the City of London and Southwark, in central London. Situated between Cannon Street Railway Bridge and Tower Bridge, it forms the western end of the Pool of London...
, a famous location where those who left the city provided themselves with reading materials:
At the afore-mentioned Place, all Country Chapmen may be furnished with all Sorts of BibleBibleThe Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
s, CommonprayersBook of Common PrayerThe Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...
, Testaments, PsalterPsalterA psalter is a volume containing the Book of Psalms, often with other devotional material bound in as well, such as a liturgical calendar and litany of the Saints. Until the later medieval emergence of the book of hours, psalters were the books most widely owned by wealthy lay persons and were...
s, PrimersAlphabet bookAn Alphabet book is a book primarily designed for young children. It presents letters of the alphabet with corresponding words and/or images. Some alphabet books feature capitals and lower case letter forms, keywords beginning with specific letters, or illustrations of keywords...
and Horn-books; Likewise all Sorts of three Sheets HistoriesPopular printPopular Prints is a term for printed images of generally low artistic quality which were sold cheaply in Europe and later the New World from the 15th to 18th centuries, often with text as well as images. They were the first mass-media...
, Penny Histories, and SermonSermonA sermon is an oration by a prophet or member of the clergy. Sermons address a Biblical, theological, religious, or moral topic, usually expounding on a type of belief, law or behavior within both past and present contexts...
s; and Choice of new and old BalladBalladA ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
s, at reasonable Rates.
Till Eulenspiegel
Till Eulenspiegel was an impudent trickster figure originating in Middle Low German folklore. His tales were disseminated in popular printed editions narrating a string of lightly connected episodes that outlined his picaresque career, primarily in Germany, the Low Countries and France...
, The Seven Wise Masters
Seven Wise Masters
The Seven Wise Masters is a cycle of stories of Sanskrit, Persian or Hebrew origins.-Story and Plot:...
, Don Belianis of Greece
Belianis
Belianis of Greece is the eponymous hero of a Castilian chivalric romance novel, following in the footsteps of the influential Amadis de Gaul. An English abridgement of this novel was published in 1673....
, Dr. Faustus, The London Prentice, or Sir John Mandeville
John Mandeville
"Jehan de Mandeville", translated as "Sir John Mandeville", is the name claimed by the compiler of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a book account of his supposed travels, written in Anglo-Norman French, and first circulated between 1357 and 1371.By aid of translations into many other languages...
's Voyages – went through innumerable editions between 1500 and 1800. People bought these books because though they were everything but modern and fashionable; one wanted to have them, because they were the books everyone had heard of, books of an eternal value to be chosen if one was not too sure about one's abilities to judge. The prefaces exploited these insecurities praising the solid value of the old and well known titles.
The design of these books deteriorated. The texts were copied without much editorship. Standard woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
illustrations were repeated, often even within a single book, wherever the plot allowed such repetition. The illustrations began to show peculiar style mixes as the printer's stocks grew: Early 18th-century editions of 16th-century titles would mix woodcuts of 16th-century knights in armor with equally crude depictions 18th-century courtiers wearing wigs.
The early modern market divide that created a field of low chapbooks and an alternative market segment of expensive fashionable, elegant belles lettres can be traced back into the 1530s and 1540s. The Amadis and Rablais
François Rabelais
François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
' Gargantua and Pantagruel
Gargantua and Pantagruel
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father and his son and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein...
were the most important publications that lead into this divide – both books that specifically addressed the new customers of popular histories. The Amadis was a multi volume fictional history of style, so the advertisements, and aroused a debate of style and elegance as it fanned the first reading craze on the market of printed fiction. Gargantua and Pantagruel had the design of the modern popular history only to satirize its stylistic achievements. The ensuing debate created a gap between "truly elegant" fictions and the conservative bulk of chapbooks. The market divide became especially visible with books that appeared on both markets in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries: The low market eventually included abridgments of classy books from Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605/1615) to the mutilations of Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
's Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...
(1719), which infuriated the author with their claim to offer the entire plot without the tedious reflections for but half the price.
The cheap abridgments openly addressed an audience that neither had the money nor the courage to buy books with engravings and fine print. The prefaces of the abridgements promised shorter sentences, more action and less reflection, and the title for half the money. The gradual differentiation between fact and fiction that affected the market of the belles lettres in the 17th and 18th centuries barely touched the low market. One could wonder whether the apprentices and peasants who read such books cared about the status King Arthur
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
, St. George or Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....
had in the historian's eye. William Caxton
William Caxton
William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...
's preface to Thomas Malory
Thomas Malory
Sir Thomas Malory was an English writer, the author or compiler of Le Morte d'Arthur. The antiquary John Leland as well as John Bale believed him to be Welsh, but most modern scholars, beginning with G. L...
's Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur is a compilation by Sir Thomas Malory of Romance tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table...
(1485) set the tone that would allow Sir John Mandeville's Voyages of the 1360s to continue to be published as a true account of Eastern wonders until the end of the 18th century.
Heroic romances of style and fashion, 1530–1720
Amadis de Gaula
Amadis de Gaula is a landmark work among the knight-errantry tales which were in vogue in 16th century Iberian Peninsula, and formed the earliest reading of many Renaissance and Baroque writers, although it was written at the onset of the 14th century.The first known printed edition was published...
in the 1530s. Two questions moved into the centre of the debate as Spanish, French and German translations and imitations flooded the European market. The first was a question of style and fashion: the Amadis had moved back into the Arthurian Middle Ages, into a world of quests, knights and adventures, though it had turned its princes and princesses into paragons of style and elegance. Was this what one had to expect of modern prose fiction? The second problem was connected with the unprecedented public reaction: the Amadis became the object of a widespread reading craze. Could a market of style and distinguished taste allow such a development?
By 1600 the Amadis had become the detested epitome of the modern romance. A search for alternative subject matters had begun. The biographies of Greek and Roman historians became the most important source here. Heliodorus
Heliodorus of Emesa
Heliodorus of Emesa, from Emesa, Syria, was a Greek writer generally dated to the third century AD who is known for the ancient Greek novel or romance called the Aethiopica or sometimes "Theagenes and Chariclea"....
' romances were to be followed in matters of style and composition, while the heroes turned from knights to princes and princesses acting now in ancient courts. The standard plot of adventures gave way to a new plot of love facing intrigues, attacks, rivalry and adversity. A new art of character observation unfolded.
The works that gained the greatest fame – Honoré d'Urfé
Honoré d'Urfé
Honoré d'Urfé, marquis de Valromey, comte de Châteauneuf was a French novelist and miscellaneous writer.- Life :...
's L'Astrée (1607–27), John Barclay's Argenis (1625–26), Madeleine de Scudéry
Madeleine de Scudéry
Madeleine de Scudéry , often known simply as Mademoiselle de Scudéry, was a French writer. She was the younger sister of author Georges de Scudéry.-Biography:...
"s ‚Clelie or Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig's
Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
Anthony Ulrich was duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg and ruled over the Wolfenbüttel subdivision of the duchy from 1685 until 1702 jointly with his brother, and solely from 1704 until his death.-Life:Anthony Ulrich was the second son of Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg; he studied at the...
Römischer Octavia (Octavia the Roman, 1679–1714) – were esteemed both as explorations of the ancient world and as works one would read with an interest in modern life. They encapsulated present histories clad in ancient costumes and dove into the realm of the roman à clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
, the novel readers would decipher with a key that betrayed who was who within this fictional world. The present fashions of courtly conduct could in the event be found nowhere in such perfection as in these seemingly historical romances. Readers used them as models for their own elegant compliments, letters, and speeches.
The genre had much in common with the production of French and Italian operas in the same period. It found trivializations with a special brand of escapist "Asian" Romances which led into the ancient empires of Assyria, Persia, India. The latter were particularly fashionable among urban female French and German readers of the younger generation, who would dream of sharing the escapes of princesses from all sorts of adversities. The individual European markets reacted differently on these fashions. The craving had a particularly short life in England where it began in the 1650s only to end in the 1670s, as these romantic plots fell out of fashion.
Satirical romances, 1500–1780
Till Eulenspiegel
Till Eulenspiegel was an impudent trickster figure originating in Middle Low German folklore. His tales were disseminated in popular printed editions narrating a string of lightly connected episodes that outlined his picaresque career, primarily in Germany, the Low Countries and France...
(1510) was the hero of chapbooks in and outside Germany. The Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes
Lazarillo de Tormes
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities is a Spanish novella, published anonymously because of its heretical content...
(1554) represented a transition from a collection of episodes towards the story of the life of a central character, the hero of the work. Grimmelshausen
Grimmelshausen
Grimmelshausen is a municipality in the district of Hildburghausen, in Thuringia, Germany....
's Simplicissimus Teutsch
Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus
Simplicius Simplicissimus is a picaresque novel of the Baroque style, written in 1668 by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and published the subsequent year...
(1666–1668) took a further step along this path, as its hero experienced recent world history, in this case the history of the Thirty Years' War
Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War was fought primarily in what is now Germany, and at various points involved most countries in Europe. It was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history....
that had devastated Germany. Richard Head
Richard Head
Richard Head was an author, playwright and bookseller. He became famous with his satirical novel The English Rogue – one of the earliest novels in English that found a continental translation.-Life:The most important primary source on Head’s life is William Winstanley's biographical entry...
's The English Rogue (1665) is rooted in this tradition (the English preface mentions the precedents; the German translation that appeared in 1672 sold the book as an English equivalent of the German Simplicissimus). The tradition that developed with these titles focused on a hero and his life. The adventures led to satirical encounters with the real world with the hero either becoming the pitiable victim or the rogue who exploited the vices of those he met.
A second tradition of satirical romances can be traced back to Heinrich Wittenwiler
Heinrich Wittenwiler
Heinrich Wittenwiler was a late medieval Alemannic poet . He is the author of a satirical poem entitled The Ring . He may be identical to an advocate to the bishop of Konstanz, mentioned in 1395. Heinrich may be of the family of the former rulers of Wittenwil in the Thurgau, who became destitute...
's Ring (c. 1410) and to François Rabelais
François Rabelais
François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
' Gargantua and Pantagruel
Gargantua and Pantagruel
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father and his son and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein...
(1532–1564). It was rather designed to parody and satirize heroic romances, and did this mostly by dragging them into the low realm of the burlesque. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1606/1615) modified the satire of romances: its hero lost contact with reality by reading too many romances in the Amadisian tradition.
Both branches of satirical production seem to have addressed a predominantly male audience (women are despicable victims in titles like Head's The English Rogue). They found the appreciation of critics as long as they revealed the weaknesses of the Amadis. The critics otherwise deplored that the satires could not offer alternatives. Other important works of the tradition are Paul Scarron
Paul Scarron
Paul Scarron was a French poet, dramatist, and novelist. His precise birthdate is unknown, but he was baptized on July 4, 1610...
's Roman Comique (1651–57) with its explicit discussions of the market of fictions, the anonymous French Rozelli with its satire on Europe's religions, Alain-René Lesage
Alain-René Lesage
Alain-René Lesage was a French novelist and playwright. Lesage is best known for his comic novel The Devil upon Two Sticks , his comedy Turcaret , and his picaresque novel Gil Blas .-Youth and education:Claude Lesage, the father of the novelist, held the united...
's Gil Blas
Gil Blas
Gil Blas is a picaresque novel by Alain-René Lesage published between 1715 and 1735. It is considered to be the last masterpiece of the picaresque genre.-Plot summary:...
(1715–1735), Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones....
's Joseph Andrews
Joseph Andrews
Joseph Andrews, or The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, was the first published full-length novel of the English author and magistrate Henry Fielding, and indeed among the first novels in the English language...
(1742) and Tom Jones
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. First published on 28 February 1749, Tom Jones is among the earliest English prose works describable as a novel...
(1749), and Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
's Jacques the Fatalist (1773, printed posthumously in 1796).
"Petites histoires" or "novels", 1600–1740
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
's Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...
(1719) – has been present on the market since the 16th century. William Painter
William Painter
William Painter was an English author and translator.William Painter was a native of Kent. He matriculated at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1554. In 1561 he became clerk of the ordnance in the Tower of London, a position in which he appears to have amassed a fortune out of the public funds...
's Palace of Pleasure well furnished with pleasaunt Histories and excellent Novelles (1566) was the first English title to use it. Compared with "romances", "novelles", "novellas" or "novels" (all these words meant the same, "novel" became the standard term in the 1650s) had to be short. They had to give up all aspirations on grandeur, heroism and the style romantic heroes and their actions required. "Romances" focused on lonely heroes and their adventures, "novels" on revealing incidents that could serve as examples for moral maxims. The titles of "romances" put their respective heroes' and heroines' names front and centre: "Artamene", "Clelie" were the heroes of "heroic romances". "Satirical romances" did the same with their lower class protagonists. The additional "Adventures of" would later emphasize the focus on acts of heroism. The titles of "novels" preferred a two part formula "[...] or [...]" in order to state the value of the incident related. William Congreve
William Congreve
William Congreve was an English playwright and poet.-Early life:Congreve was born in Bardsey, West Yorkshire, England . His parents were William Congreve and his wife, Mary ; a sister was buried in London in 1672...
's Incognita or Love and Duty Reconcil'd (1692) was typical in this respect. The protagonists of "novels" were actors in a plot, in an intrigue, and it was the plot that gave the example and taught the vital lessons. These protagonists could be average human beings without any special signs of grandeur, neither comical nor imitable but of the same nature as their readers; they would by and large show problematic character traits. Unlike romances, the protagonists were not role models: instead, the surprising results of their actions taught the lessons.
The rise of the "novel" as the major alternative to the antiquated "romance" began with the publication of Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
Novelas Exemplares
Novelas ejemplares
The Exemplary Novels are a series of short stories by Miguel de Cervantes. Written between 1590 and 1612, the collection was published in Madrid in 1613 by Juan de la Cuesta, and received well in the wake of the first part of Don Quixote. These are twelve short novels that follow the model...
(1613). It unfolded with Scarron
Paul Scarron
Paul Scarron was a French poet, dramatist, and novelist. His precise birthdate is unknown, but he was baptized on July 4, 1610...
's Roman Comique, whose heroes noted a rivalry of French "romances" and the new Spanish genre. France had to find, Scarron wrote at the time, its own brand of short stories.
Late 17th-century critics looked back onto the history of prose fiction proud of the generic shift towards the modern novel/novella. A wave of "petites histoires" or "nouvelles historiques" had replaced the old romances. The first perfect works in French were those of Scarron and Madame de La Fayette's "Spanish history" Zayde (1670). The development finally led to her Princesse de Clèves
La Princesse de Clèves
La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It is regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel, and as a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette.The action takes place between...
(1678), the first novel with what would become characteristic French subject matter (Marie de LaFayette's authorship remained a secret, though, over the next decades).
Europe witnessed the generic shift with the titles Dutch francophone publishers supplied on the international market. English publishers exploited the novel/romance controversy in the 1670s and 1680s. The word "novel" began to replace the word "romance" on title pages in the 1680s. Contemporary critics listed the advantages of the new genre: brevity, a lack of ambition to produce epic poetry in prose. The style was fresh and plain; the focus was on modern life and on heroes who were neither good nor bad. One learned through their actions, not by imitating them. The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip and scandal fuelled the rise of the novel/novella. The authors of modern journalistic gossip spiced their works with short anonymous histories. The stories were offered as allegedly true recent histories, not for the sake of scandal but strictly for the moral lessons they gave. To prove this, one would read fictionalized names (and read the true names in separate keys). The Mercure Gallant set the fashion in the 1670s. Collections of letters and memoirs appeared, and were filled with the intriguing new subject matter. The epistolary novel
Epistolary novel
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
grew on this market and found its first full blown example of scandalous fiction with Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.-Early life:...
's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister by Aphra Behn is a three volume roman à clef playing with events of the Monmouth Rebellion and exploring the genre of the epistolary novel...
(1684/ 1685/ 1687).
The development did not lead to Robinson Crusoe – a work that was almost provocatively (both in 1719 when it appeared and still in the 1760s) a new "romance", thanks to its exotic setting and thanks to its singular hero offering a story of survival in isolation. Crusoe lacked almost all the amenities of the new "novels": wit, a fast narration evolving around a group of young fashionable urban heroes and their intrigues, a scandalous moral, gallant talk to be imitated and brevity and conciseness of the plot. The development did, however, lead to Eliza Haywood
Eliza Haywood
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood’s literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest...
's epic length "novel" Love in Excess (1719/20) and to Samuel Richardson
Samuel Richardson
Samuel Richardson was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded , Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady and The History of Sir Charles Grandison...
's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741), essentially still a novel with its typical two part title: naming the story and promising its value as an example. It led to a production of classics of the intriguing production and to a reform movement in the 1740s.
Dubious and scandalous histories, 1660–1720
Term catalogue
A Term Catalogue, German Messkatalog, is a serial publication compiled to inform customers—most importantly book traders from other cities—of the book production as available on the book fairs. The first such catalogue was issued by Georg Willer in Augsburg in 1564...
s had in stock for the entire production of pamphlet
Pamphlet
A pamphlet is an unbound booklet . It may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths , or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and saddle stapled at the crease to make a simple book...
s, memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
s, travel literature
Travel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...
, political analysis, serious histories, romances and novels.
That fictional histories could share the same space with academic histories and modern journalism had been criticized by historians since the end of the Middle Ages: fictions were "lies" and therefore hardly justifiable at all. The climate had, however, changed, in the 1670s. Paradoxically, the same historians who pleaded for a new era of academic research also pleaded for fiction to stay within the field of histories. The authors who advocated Pyrrhonism
Pyrrhonism
Pyrrhonism, or Pyrrhonian skepticism, was a school of skepticism founded by Aenesidemus in the 1st century BCE and recorded by Sextus Empiricus in the late 2nd century or early 3rd century CE. It was named after Pyrrho, a philosopher who lived from c. 360 to c. 270 BCE, although the relationship...
, scepticism as a historical discipline, did not demand that fictions change. Instead, they demanded that historians should step from the old project of historical narratives to a new project of critical analysis and discussion of sources. Pierre Bayle
Pierre Bayle
Pierre Bayle was a French philosopher and writer best known for his seminal work the Historical and Critical Dictionary, published beginning in 1695....
exemplified this with all the articles of his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique
Dictionnaire Historique et Critique
The Dictionnaire Historique et Critique is a biographical dictionary written by Pierre Bayle , a Huguenot who lived and published in Holland after fleeing his native France due to religious persecution. The dictionary was first published in 1697, and enlarged in the second edition of 1702...
(1697) and with his statements on the legitimacy of fictions, especially those of the modern political market.
The new novels, romances and dubious histories, the quasi historical and yet immensely readable works of the Madame d'Aulnoy
Madame d'Aulnoy
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy , also known as Countess d'Aulnoy, was a French writer known for her fairy tales...
, César Vichard de Saint-Réal
César Vichard de Saint-Réal
César Vichard de Saint-Réal was a French polygraph.He was born in Chambéry, Savoy, but educated in Lyon by the Jesuits. He used to work in the royal library with Antoine Varillas. This French historiographer influenced the way Saint-Réal wrote history...
, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras
Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras
Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras was a French novelist, journalist, pamphleteer and memorialist.His abundant output includes short stories, gallant letters, tales of historical love affairs , historical and political works, biographies and semi-fictional "memoirs" Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644,...
, and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, were, according to the modern advocates of the free press, not only embedded in the field of veritable critical histories: they had an important function to fulfill in that field. In a time when factuality was not a sufficient defence against a libel suit, the romantic lay out allowed the publication of histories that could not risk an unambiguous assertion of their truth. The question was not whether one should separate the markets of true and fictional histories from each other but whether one would be able to establish critical discourses to evaluate all the interesting production.
The market of the late 17th century and early 18th century employed a simple pattern of options of how fictions could both be part of the historical production and reach out into the sphere of true histories. The fringes of this pattern flourished as cheap excuses. They allowed it authors to claim they had published fiction, not truth, if they ever faced outright allegations of libel:
Heroical Romances:
Fénelon's Telemach (1699)
Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of public affairs:
Manley's The New Atalantis (1709)
Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of private affairs:
Menantes' Satyrischer Roman (1706)
Classics of the novel from the Arabian Nights to M. de La Fayette's Princesse de Clèves (1678)
Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention:
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Sold as true public history, risking to be read as romantic invention:
La Guerre d'Espagne (1707)
Satirical Romances:
Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605)
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
. Other works could, conversely, claim to be factual histories, yet earn the suspicion that they were wholly invented. A further differentiation was made between private and public history: Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
's Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...
was, within this pattern, neither "romance" nor "novel". It smelled – with its title page alluding to Fénelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) – of romance, while the preface stated that one (most certainly) read a true private history:
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.
IF
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, 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.
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe did not use the twilight to spread political insinuations; the hardly credible account did, however, offer the alternative of a deeper allegorical reading. Other authors proved the practical value of the pattern. Delarivier Manley
Delarivier Manley
Delarivier Manley was an English novelist of amatory fiction, playwright, and political pamphleteer...
–under interrogation after the publication of her scandalous Atalantis (1709)–replied that she had written a work of sheer romance, a fairy tale located on the famous fictional island. If the ruling Whigs wanted to prove that all her stories matched a scandalous truth of their own actions, they might venture a libel case. The authoress was released and continued her insinuations with three more volumes of proclaimed romance published during the next two years.
While journalists continued to defend the dubious production (relying on the enlightened audience's ability to read with the necessary grain of skepticism if not with amusement), the defenders of public morals demanded an entirely new organization of the market, one that isolated fiction. This was the market the 18th century was to establish.
From dubious history to literature: The 18th-century market reform
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The Rise of the Novel
The 18th century "rise of the novel has several theorized causes.One is a story of statistics. English readers of the late 17th century and early 18th century were offered a total of some 2,000 to 3,000 titles per year. The numbers had risen dramatically after the abolition of the Star Chamber
Star Chamber
The Star Chamber was an English court of law that sat at the royal Palace of Westminster until 1641. It was made up of Privy Counsellors, as well as common-law judges and supplemented the activities of the common-law and equity courts in both civil and criminal matters...
in 1641. The simple title count gives, however, a distorted picture as it equates the sales and influence of theological and political pamphlets with editions of books printed to sell over several years. Statistics of the French and German markets have their own distortions: French numbers are comparatively higher because Dutch publishers printed (or reprinted) French books for the international market. French was Europe's lingua franca
Lingua franca
A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...
and the language of international politics and fashions. Germany's book trade was large but divided between Protestant and Catholic states. The former had arranged for a wider exchange at Leipzig's fairs. The academic production in Latin was comparatively large on the continent due to the importance continental universities had gained as providers of careers.
Literature, as we nowadays define it, was of marginal significance in Europe until the end of the 18th century. In the Western markets some 2% to 5% of the total production fell into the categories of poetry and dubious or elegant historical works that were later united under the new heading of "literature". In English, fictional output remained here at 20 to 60 titles per year in the beginning of the 18th century, depending on how one accounts for the wider market of histories. French, German and Dutch statistics are comparable. The eastern and southern European neighbors largely subscribed to the international market.
The Western European output of literature in the modern sense rose significantly in the course of the 18th century; the growth rates stabilised in the 1740s. A change in the public appreciation supported that growth and was reflected by the growing media coverage of new works.
Cultural status and place
As of around 1700, fiction was no longer a predominantly aristocratic entertainment. The Provençal 12th century romances and their imitations had already attracted urban connoisseurs who had had the financial means to commission bigger manuscripts in the 14th and 15th centuries. Printed books had soon gained the power to reach readers of almost all classes, the reading habits differed. To follow fashions remained a privilege. Spain was a trendsetter into the 1630s; French authors superseded Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
, de Quevedo
Francisco de Quevedo
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas was a Spanish nobleman, politician and writer of the Baroque era. Along with his lifelong rival, Luis de Góngora, Quevedo was one of the most prominent Spanish poets of the age. His style is characterized by what was called conceptismo...
, and Alemán
Mateo Alemán
Mateo Alemán y de Enero was a Spanish novelist and writer.He graduated at Seville University in 1564, studied later at Salamanca and Alcalá, and from 1571 to 1588 held a post in the treasury; in 1594 he was arrested on suspicion of malversation, but was speedily released...
in the 1640s. As Huet
Pierre Daniel Huet
Pierre Daniel Huet was a French churchman and scholar, editor of the Delphin Classics, founder of the Academie du Physique in Caen and Bishop of Soissons from 1685 to 1689 and afterwards of Avranches.-Life:...
was to note in 1670, the change was one of manners. The new French works taught a new, on the surface freer, gallant exchange between the sexes as the essence of life at the French court. Aristocratic and bourgeois customers sought distinctly French authors to offer the authentic style of conversations in the 1660s.
The situation changed again from 1660s into the 1690s: the French market split. Dutch publishers began to sell works by French authors, published out of the reach of French censors. The publishing houses of The Hague and Amsterdam also pirated the entire Parisian production of fashionable books and thus created a new market of political and scandalous fictions and European fashions. Composers Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli was an Italian violinist and composer of Baroque music.-Biography:Corelli was born at Fusignano, in the current-day province of Ravenna, although at the time it was in the province of Ferrara. Little is known about his early life...
and Vivaldi
Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi , nicknamed because of his red hair, was an Italian Baroque composer, priest, and virtuoso violinist, born in Venice. Vivaldi is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread over Europe...
sent their sheet music from Italy to Étienne Roger in Amsterdam in order to reach a wider European audience. The same Roger published Renneville's
René Auguste Constantin de Renneville
René Auguste Constantin de Renneville , was a French writer.He was born at Caen. Because of his Protestant principles, Renneville left France for the Netherlands in 1699. On his return three years later he was denounced as a spy and imprisoned in the Bastille, where he remained until 1713...
L'inquisition Françoise (1715). In the year of its publication, the latter work was available both in an English version published in London and a German version published in Nuremberg. Books of the period boasted of their fame on the international market and of the existence of intermediate translations. "Written originally in Italian and translated from the third edition of the French" one read in imitation of this craze on title page of Manley's New Atalantis in 1709. A market of European rather than French fashions had arrived in the early 18th century.
The reform became the main goal of the second generation of 18th-century novelists who, by the mid-century, openly welcomed the change of climate that had first been promoted in journals such as The Spectator
The Spectator (1711)
The Spectator was a daily publication of 1711–12, founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England after they met at Charterhouse School. Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison's, also contributed to the publication. Each 'paper', or 'number', was approximately 2,500 words long, and the...
(No. 10 of The Spectator had stated the aim "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality… to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses"). Constructive criticism of novels had until then hardly left the world of fiction. The first treatise on the history of the novel had appeared as a preface to a novel, Marie de La Fayette's Zayde (1670). "Literary journals" devoted to the sciences could not easily switch to devote themselves to belles lettres. A distinct secondary discourse developed with a wave of entertaining new journals like The Spectator and The Tatler
Tatler
Tatler has been the name of several British journals and magazines, each of which has viewed itself as the successor of the original literary and society journal founded by Richard Steele in 1709. The current incarnation, founded in 1901, is a glossy magazine published by Condé Nast Publications...
at the beginning of the century. New "literary journals" like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature...
's Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend (1758) added to this production in the middle of the century with the offer of new, scientific reviews of art and fiction. By the 1780s, critical public reception constituted a new marketing platform for fiction, and authors and publishers recognized it as such. One could write to satisfy the old market or one could address the authors of secondary criticism and gain an audience through their discussions. It would take yet another generation for the novel to arrive in the curricula of school and university education. By the end of the 18th century, the public perception of the place of a particular novel was no longer supplied simply by social status and fashionable geographical provenance, but by critical media attention.
Realism and art
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
" is regularly applied to 19th-century fiction. The novels Defoe, Richardson and Fielding wrote between 1719 and the 1750s can be read as precursors. Research of the last decades has, however, contested views that it was Robinson Crusoe's realism that ended the sway of "French baroque romances".
Madeleine de Scudéry's "romances" had not been completely unrealistic; Keys
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
had circulated with them. They had left the market nonetheless in the 1670s, defeated by the more realistic "novels" that appeared then. The ensuing production had broadly encroached upon the news market: Delarivier Manley
Delarivier Manley
Delarivier Manley was an English novelist of amatory fiction, playwright, and political pamphleteer...
's Atalantis was reviewed by a German academic journal in 1713 as work of contemporary public history. Christian Friedrich Hunold
Christian Friedrich Hunold
Christian Friedrich Hunold was a German author who wrote under the pseudonym Menantes.- Biography :...
fled Hamburg in 1706 after his Satyrischer Roman had depicted the city's elegant urban life as a place of scandal. The French pseudo histories connected today with names such as Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644–1712) had become even more radical in their realism: they had depicted the real world with a detail historians remain unable to deactivate as "merely fiction".
It has been noted that Defoe's Robinson Crusoe followed Alexander Selkirk
Alexander Selkirk
Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish sailor who spent four years as a castaway when he was marooned on an uninhabited island. It is probable that his travels provided the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe....
's "true" account. and that Crusoe's style of writing recycled modes of the Protestant spiritual autobiography. The presentation of his book had its own models, however, much rather in the contemporary French pseudo histories. René Auguste Constantin de Renneville
René Auguste Constantin de Renneville
René Auguste Constantin de Renneville , was a French writer.He was born at Caen. Because of his Protestant principles, Renneville left France for the Netherlands in 1699. On his return three years later he was denounced as a spy and imprisoned in the Bastille, where he remained until 1713...
's report of his imprisonment in the Bastille had appeared in English with Defoe's publisher William Taylor four years earlier. Renneville had promised: "Lives and strange Adventures of several Prisoners", Crusoe risked the focus on himself: "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe". An imprisonment of 11 years had been Renneville's bargain, Crusoe made it 28 years. Renneville's English translator had complained of an author who was "not always in a Temper; sometimes he is all Piety and Godliness, and then again flies out into a Romantick Strain." Crusoe's "editor" Taylor repeated these complaints before the sailor himself raised his voice with the greatest inconsistencies imaginable, claiming that he was both, most real and healthy (though 84 years of age) and a man of an allegorical truth with which he stood on one level with Don Quixote, a hero of a roman à clef (so Crusoe), and Jesus Christ who had resorted to allegories and parables in order to reach his audience. Robinson Crusoe was serialized as possibly true history by The Original London Post; and it became the work of creative literature Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
could finally praise in his Émile, ou De l'éducation
Emile: Or, On Education
Émile, or On Education is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. Due to a section of the book entitled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” Émile was be...
in 1762.
One can note a balance of opposing developments here: the 18th century witnessed the rise of increasingly realistic fictions, while both authors and critics defined the entire field of fictions as distinct from the historical. The development de-scandalised the market: Valuable fictions defended a higher truth, a truth beyond the flat, factual and historical truth of every-day experience. Theories of aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
praised the "imitation of nature" and the artist's almost divine power to create worlds of a deeper significance in the second half of the 18th century. The previous conflict between historians and romancers was thus finally resolved: Valuable Fictions and true histories became two fields the modern nations needed. Literary journals and literary histories became the privileged media of a new analysis of literary art – the development that has been noted above as one of status and that eventually caused the 19th century conceptual change of the word literature.
The market divide that led to the modern trivial production in the second half of the 18th century was the by product of this process. The rise of pornography beginning in the 1750s is an early sign for that divide.
The words "novel" and "romance"
The change of taste remained a temporal phenomenon. Fénelon's
François Fénelon
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, more commonly known as François Fénelon , was a French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer...
Telemachus (1699/1700) already exploited a nostalgia for the old production of heroism and professed virtue. Jane Barker
Jane Barker
Jane Barker was an English poet and novelist of the early 18th century. The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia was considered her most successful work. A staunch Jacobite, she followed King James II of England into exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France shortly after James’ defeat in the Glorious...
explicitly advertised her Exilius as "A new Romance", "written after the Manner of Telemachus" in 1715 to which she added a preface on the scandalous new production one had to get rid of. Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...
spoke of his own book as a "romance" though he preferred, of course, readers to believe he was utterly real.
The term "novel" first peaked on the English market in the 1680s, when the novel(la) manifested itself as the alternative to the older "romance". It lost its attractiveness with ensuing scandalous production in the twilight between truth and fiction. The 1720s saw a second peak of "novels" with the first editions of classics of the genre and with new large scale "novels" in the style Eliza Haywood wrote. In the mid-18th century it was no longer clear whether the market had not simply developed two terms: "romance" as the generic term, "novel" as the term for the fashionable production that focused on modern life.
The late 18th-century brought an answer with the "romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
" movement's readiness to reclaim the word "romance" as term for explicitly grotesque and distant fictional settings. Robinson Crusoe became a "novel" in that period appearing now as a work of the new realism of fiction the 18th century had brought forth. The term "romance" was eventually restricted to love stories in the course of the 19th century.
Legitimating the novel: World Classics, 1670–1830
Pierre Daniel Huet
Pierre Daniel Huet was a French churchman and scholar, editor of the Delphin Classics, founder of the Academie du Physique in Caen and Bishop of Soissons from 1685 to 1689 and afterwards of Avranches.-Life:...
's Traitté de l'origine des romans
Traitté de l'origine des romans
Pierre Daniel Huet's Trai[t]té de l'origine des Romans can claim to be the first history of fiction. It was originally published in 1670 as preface to Marie de la Fayette's novel Zayde. The following will give extended excerpts from the English translation by Stephen Lewis published in 1715...
(1670) laid the ground for the early 18th-century market in classics of the novel. The theologian had not only dared to praise fictions; he had also explained techniques of theological reading, the interpretation of fictions: one could read novels and romances to gain insight into foreign and distant cultures (and into one's own culture), once one viewed them as something produced to achieve aims and to satisfy consumers. Christ had used parables to teach; ancient Milesians
Miletus
Miletus was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia , near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria...
had used them to arouse sexual fantasies; France produced them at present to test the options of a less inhibited conversation between the sexes.
The decades around 1700 saw the appearance of new editions of Petronius
Petronius
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.-Life:...
, Lucian
Lucian
Lucian of Samosata was a rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.His ethnicity is disputed and is attributed as Assyrian according to Frye and Parpola, and Syrian according to Joseph....
and Heliodorus of Emesa
Heliodorus of Emesa
Heliodorus of Emesa, from Emesa, Syria, was a Greek writer generally dated to the third century AD who is known for the ancient Greek novel or romance called the Aethiopica or sometimes "Theagenes and Chariclea"....
. The publishers equipped them with prefaces that referred to Huet's treatise and the canon it had established. Exotic fictions entered the market to give insight into the Islamic frame of mind. One read The Book of One Thousand and One Nights
The Book of One Thousand and One Nights
One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age...
(first published in Europe from 1704 to 1715 in French, and translated immediately from this edition into English and German) as a contribution to Huet's history of romances.
New classics added to the market: The English Select Collection of Novels in six volumes (1720–22) is a milestone in this development, including Huet's Treatise with the European tradition of the modern novel (that is, novella) from Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He is one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic...
's to Marie de LaFayette's masterpieces.
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.-Early life:...
'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
François Fénelon
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, more commonly known as François Fénelon , was a French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer...
's Telemachus (1699/1700) became a classic within three years after its publication. New authors entered the market ready to use their personal names as producers of fiction: Eliza Haywood
Eliza Haywood
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood’s literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest...
thus followed the footsteps of Aphra Behn in 1719 using her name with unprecedented pride.
"The reformation of manners", 1678–1790
Reformation of Manners
The Reformation of Manners was an ideological drive to bring religious discipline to English parishes in the early modern period. Following the sixteenth-century religious reformation in parts of England, Calvinism heavily influenced the governance of many parishes...
that had begun in the 1690s now led to their reform.
Female authors and heroines were the first affected by the development. Madame d'Aulnoy
Madame d'Aulnoy
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy , also known as Countess d'Aulnoy, was a French writer known for her fairy tales...
and Delarivier Manley
Delarivier Manley
Delarivier Manley was an English novelist of amatory fiction, playwright, and political pamphleteer...
became notorious examples of a bygone age of impudence. They had washed their dirty linen in public and used their novels to reinvent themselves and convert their own notoriety into fame. The new female heroines had to show intimacy and sensitivity where their early 18th century ancestors had been ready to appear in public in order to sanitize their reputations. Intimate confessions and blushes filled the new novels, feelings of guilt, even where suspicions were groundless (early 18th century heroines had defended their virtues and reputations flamboyantly even where they had gone astray). The modern heroines acted transparently, whereas their early 18th century counterparts had resorted to secret dealings in endless intrigues. Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves
La Princesse de Clèves
La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It is regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel, and as a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette.The action takes place between...
(1678) can be read as the first novel that showed the new behavior.
Social environment
The social environment of an individual, also called social context or milieu, is the culture that s/he was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom the person interacts....
s. Marie de La Fayette's Princesse had fallen into a desperate situation as soon as she risked the outrageous transparency to confess her feelings for another man to her husband. Neither he nor his rival knew how to continue once all this was clear. Mid-18th-century novels created alternatives: protagonists acted transparently, their antagonists saw that as a weakness and exploited and ruined them – quite the early 18th century option – but now the moral balance shifted: the open-hearted heroines were no longer victims one could blame for a lack of virtue, but tragic (or melodramatic) figures who had defended a better world. Other novels placed the new transparent heroines into equally new caring environments. Their families resisted temptations to marry them off against their wills, and men around them resisted temptations to seduce them in moments of weakness. The message was that respect and care were to meet open-heartedness in a new age of sensibility
Sensibility
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered...
. Other novels experimented with surprising acts of an enlightened
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
rationality
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
with which their protagonists could escape deadlock situations far worse than the one Marie de La Fayette's Princesse had produced with her confessions.
The last volume of Antoine François Prévost
Antoine François Prévost
Antoine François Prévost , usually known simply as the Abbé Prévost, was a French author and novelist.- Life and works :...
's Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality, "Manon Lescaut
Manon Lescaut
Manon Lescaut is a short novel by French author Abbé Prévost. Published in 1731, it is the seventh and final volume of Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité . It was controversial in its time and was banned in France upon publication...
" (1731), aroused a scandal with its melodramatic turns and its unresolved conflicts.
Samuel Richardson
Samuel Richardson
Samuel Richardson was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded , Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady and The History of Sir Charles Grandison...
's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), composed "to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes" focused, by contrast, on the potential victim, a heroine of all the modern virtues vulnerable through her social status and her occupation as servant of the libertine who falls in love with her. Eventually, she shows the power to reform her antagonist.
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert was a German poet, one of the forerunners of the golden age of German literature that was ushered in by Lessing.-Biography:...
's Life of the Swedish Countess of G** (1747/48) tested the options of rationality. The titular countess had to decide between two husbands after her first, believed to be dead, returned from a Siberian war captivity. Both her husbands, former friends, had to come to terms with the rational problem her situation presented (and did it in a startling mixture of piety and modern philosophy).
Sentimental novel
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility...
character traits in the 1760s. Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
's Yorick
Yorick
Yorick is the deceased court jester whose skull is exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of William Shakespeare's Hamlet.Yorick may also refer to:* Yorick...
, the hero of the Sentimental Journey
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by the Irish-born English author Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his...
(1768) did so with an enormous amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith was an Irish writer, poet and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield , his pastoral poem The Deserted Village , and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer...
's Vicar of Wakefield
The Vicar of Wakefield
The Vicar of Wakefield is a novel by Irish author Oliver Goldsmith. It was written in 1761 and 1762, and published in 1766, and was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels among Victorians...
(1766) and Henry Mackenzie
Henry Mackenzie
Henry Mackenzie was a Scottish novelist and miscellaneous writer. He was also known by the sobriquet "Addison of the North."-Biography:Mackenzie was born in Edinburgh....
's Man of Feeling (1771) produced the far more serious role models.
The virtuous production inspired a sub
Subculture
In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...
- and counterculture
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
of pornographic
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
novels. Greek and Latin authors in modern translations had provided elegant transgressions on the market of the belles lettres for the last century. Satirical novels like Richard Head
Richard Head
Richard Head was an author, playwright and bookseller. He became famous with his satirical novel The English Rogue – one of the earliest novels in English that found a continental translation.-Life:The most important primary source on Head’s life is William Winstanley's biographical entry...
's English Rogue (1665) had led their heroes through urban brothels, women authors like Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.-Early life:...
had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of the 19th-century femmes fatales
Femme fatale
A femme fatale is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art...
– without creating a subculture. The market for belles lettres had been openly transgressive as long as it did not find any reflections in other media. The new production beginning with works like John Cleland
John Cleland
John Cleland was an English novelist most famous and infamous as the author of Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure....
's Fanny Hill
Fanny Hill
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is an erotic novel by John Cleland first published in England in 1748...
(1748) differed in that it offered almost exact reversals of the plot lines the virtuous production demanded. Fanny Hill is introduced to a life of prostitution, learns to enjoy her part and establishes herself as a free and economically independent individual – in editions one could only expect to buy under the counter.
Openly uncontrollable conflicts arrived in the 1770s with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
's The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787...
(1774). The titular hero realised how impossible it had become for him to integrate into the new conformist society. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses ....
's Les Liaisons dangereuses
Les Liaisons dangereuses
Les Liaisons dangereuses is a French epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782....
(1782) shows the other extreme, with a group of aristocrats playing games of intrigue and amorality.
The sentimental protagonists of the 1740s had already surprised their readers and aroused a debate whether human nature was correctly depicted with these new novels. They discovered a truth of the heart one had not dared to deal with so far. The radical and lonely characters that appeared in the 1760s and 1770s broke with traditions and eventually needed entirely new back-stories to become plausible. Childhoods, and adolescences had to explain why these protagonists should have developed so differently. The concept of character development
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
began to fascinate novelists in the 1760s. Jean Jacques Rousseau's novels focused on such developments in philosophical experiments. The German Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
offered quasi-biographical explorations and autobiographical self examinations of the individual and its personal development by the 1790s. A subcategory of the genre focused on the creation of an artist (if not the artist writing the novel). It led to the 19th-century production of novels exploring how modern times form the modern individual.
Fiction as a new experimental field, 1700–1800
Philosophical fiction was not exactly new. Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's dialogues were embedded in fictional narratives. Utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
s had added to this production with works from Thomas More
Thomas More
Sir Thomas More , also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor...
's Utopia
Utopia (book)
Utopia is a work of fiction by Thomas More published in 1516...
(1516) to Tommaso Campanella
Tommaso Campanella
Tommaso Campanella OP , baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella, was an Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet.-Biography:...
's City of the Sun
The City of the Sun
The City of the Sun is a philosophical work by the Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella. It is an important early utopian work.The work was written in Italian in 1602, shortly after Campanella's imprisonment for heresy and sedition...
(1602). Works such as these had not been read as novels or romances but as philosophical texts. The 1740s saw new editions of More's work under the title that created the tradition: Utopia: or the happy republic; a philosophical romance (1743).
Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
utilised the romance to write philosophy with his Micromegas: a comic romance. Being a severe satire upon the philosophy, ignorance, and self-conceit of mankind
Micromégas
"Micromégas" is a short story by the French philosopher and satirist Voltaire. It is a significant development in the history of literature because it originates ideas which helped create the genre of science fiction....
(1752, English 1753). His Zadig
Zadig
Zadig ou la Destinée, is a famous novel and work of philosophical fiction written by Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. It tells the story of Zadig, a philosopher in ancient Babylonia...
(1747) and Candide
Candide
Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best ; Candide: or, The Optimist ; and Candide: or, Optimism...
(1759) became central texts of the French Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
and of the modern novel. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
bridged the genres with his less fictional Emile: or, On Education
Emile: Or, On Education
Émile, or On Education is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. Due to a section of the book entitled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” Émile was be...
(1762) and his far more romantic Julie, or the New Heloise (1761). It made sense to publish these works as romances or novels, works of fiction, only because prose fiction had become an object of public discussion. The public reception provided by the new market of journals was both freer and wider than the discussion in journals of philosophy would have been. It had become attractive to step into the realm of fiction in order to provide matter for the ongoing debates.
The genre's new understanding of itself resulted in the first metafiction
Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
al experiment, pressing against its limitations. Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next 10 years....
(1759–1767) rejected continuous narration. It expanded the author-reader communication from the preface into the plot itself – Tristram Shandy develops as a conversation between the narrative voice and his audience. Besides narrative experiments, there were visual experiments: a marbled page, a black page to express particular sorrow, a page of little lines to visualize the plot lines of the book one was reading. Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
's A Tale of a Tub
A Tale of a Tub
A Tale of a Tub was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift, composed between 1694 and 1697 and published in 1704. It is arguably his most difficult satire, and perhaps his most masterly...
(1704) is an early precursor in this field – a work that employs visual elements with similar ambition – yet hardly a text in the tradition of the original novel or its rival the romance.
The novel as national literature, 19th-century developments
Exact science
An exact science is any field of science capable of accurate quantitative expression or precise predictions and rigorous methods of testing hypotheses, especially reproducible experiments involving quantifiable predictions and measurements...
s, the social sciences
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
with an outlook on the modern societies, and the humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
with a responsibility for history and culture. Literature in a definition that turned fiction into a central literary production would be a subject of the philologies in the latter segment of research.
The traditional task of literary historians, to review
Review
A review is an evaluation of a publication, a product or a service, such as a movie , video game, musical composition , book ; a piece of hardware like a car, home appliance, or computer; or an event or performance, such as a live music concert, a play, musical theater show or dance show...
the sciences, was referred to the individual sciences and their respective academic journal
Academic journal
An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...
s. The general debate of literature was turned into an exploration of poetry and fiction.
The modes of this exploration were new. Poetry had been analysed in poetological treatises asking for perfection and the rules that had to be mastered in the different genres. Early 18th-century critics had been ready to see the opera as the central poetic production of the modern era. One would differentiate between an Italian and a French style and consider an international production. This arrangement was discredited in the course of the 18th century. Operas became music and the new literary histories offered in the 19th century focused on the greatest works an outstanding nation or language had brought forth. The new interest lay in interpretations. Georg Gottfried Gervinus
Georg Gottfried Gervinus
Georg Gottfried Gervinus was a German literary and political historian.-Biography:Gervinus was born in Darmstadt. He was educated at the gymnasium of the town, and intended for a commercial career, but in 1825 he became a student of the university of Giessen...
' Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, published in its successive volumes between 1835 and 1842 became the European model with a project that rather resembled Pierre Daniel Huet
Pierre Daniel Huet
Pierre Daniel Huet was a French churchman and scholar, editor of the Delphin Classics, founder of the Academie du Physique in Caen and Bishop of Soissons from 1685 to 1689 and afterwards of Avranches.-Life:...
's Treatise on the Origin of Romances
Traitté de l'origine des romans
Pierre Daniel Huet's Trai[t]té de l'origine des Romans can claim to be the first history of fiction. It was originally published in 1670 as preface to Marie de la Fayette's novel Zayde. The following will give extended excerpts from the English translation by Stephen Lewis published in 1715...
(1670) than any of the previous works on poetry or on literature (the sciences). The new literary historian spoke about the cultural significance of the works he analysed. Unlike Huet Gervinus was solely interested in the works of his nation – whose history and mentality he hoped do better understand. Other nations were of interest as they had threatened the intellectual development to be observed. Huet had given a world history of fiction. The 19th-century literary historian offered his project with the controversial promise to show how the nation had freed and found itself in its fictional production.
The project persuaded scholars in France and Italy to bring forth similar histories for their nations while the Anglophone world remained rather uninterested. Hippolyte Taine
Hippolyte Taine
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French critic and historian. He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism, and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate...
eventually offered the first history of English literature at first in French, a year later, in 1864 in an English version that opened with a look back on the 1st century of modern literary history:
HISTORY, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures.
The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful.
We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give them their place in history, and one of the highest.
War of the Spanish Succession
The War of the Spanish Succession was fought among several European powers, including a divided Spain, over the possible unification of the Kingdoms of Spain and France under one Bourbon monarch. As France and Spain were among the most powerful states of Europe, such a unification would have...
(1701–1714) and the Great Northern War
Great Northern War
The Great Northern War was a conflict in which a coalition led by the Tsardom of Russia successfully contested the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in northern Central Europe and Eastern Europe. The initial leaders of the anti-Swedish alliance were Peter I the Great of Russia, Frederick IV of...
(1700–1721) had eventually left the intellectual elite disenchanted. The discussion of the nation's poetry Johann Christoph Gottsched
Johann Christoph Gottsched
Johann Christoph Gottsched was a German author and critic.-Biography:He was born at Juditten near Königsberg, Brandenburg-Prussia, the son of a Lutheran clergyman...
proposed at the end of the 1720s formulated a national project connected with the offer to reform the entire market of German poetry. Johann Jakob Bodmer
Johann Jakob Bodmer
Johann Jakob Bodmer was a Swiss-German author, academic, critic and poet.-Life:Born at Greifensee, near Zürich, and first studying theology and then trying a commercial career, he finally found his vocation in letters...
, Johann Jakob Breitinger
Johann Jakob Breitinger
Johann Jakob Breitinger was a Swiss philologist and author.- Life :Breitinger studied theology and philology and first earned recognition from 1730 through a new edition of the Septuaginta. From 1731 he worked as Professor of Hebrew and later of Greek in the gymnasium in Zürich...
, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature...
adopted Gottsched's project and created the national discourse that finally gained national importance between 1789 and 1813 when Germany had to define itself in the events of the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
.
At the turn into the 19th century the first German territories implemented the new field of research in their national school curricula. Three decades later the first histories of German literature apperaed with proposals of the canon the young nation would need. Literature made its way into the educational systems, it became the object of the university philologies, of German classes at schools, and of criticism in the public media.
The new topic was of immense interest thanks to its focus on the nation, thanks to its controversial perspectives on the nation's history and identity, thanks to its attempts to reform the markets of fiction. The secularization
Secularization
Secularization is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward non-religious values and secular institutions...
pushed the new topic in France and Germany. Literature offered worldly texts to be interpreted in schools and at universities where religious texts had been interpreted thus far.
The Anglophone world adopted the new topic reluctantly. London had developed a commercial production of the belles lettres, independent from the markets of Amsterdam and Paris, as early as the early 18th century. The new market had found its own commercial criticism and did not need an academic variant with a distinctly national perspective. Shakespeare had become an object of national veneration without the help of academic critics by the 1760s. A rediscovery of the past had followed, with such doubtful discoveries as the Ossian
Ossian
Ossian is the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology...
-fragments. Critics discussed the belles lettres in fashionable English journals. Latest theatre performances were discussed in the newspapers at the end of the 18th century. The continental debate of "literature" remained uninteresting with all the academic institutions it promised to generate.
Great Britain did not need new national platforms. State politics and religion were open platforms – in Britain protected by modern press laws since the 1690s. The continent had opted for a fundamental secularisation. Britain rested on the union of state and church, the USA on the opposite notion of private religiosity and a state that would not interfere. Neither country needed a topic for school lessons, in which worldly texts would be used in much the same way as religious texts had been used before. As for criticism of plays and fictions one could well live with the commercial criticism the market brought forth. Germany invented a dualism of "Literaturwissenschaft", literary criticism formulated by university professors, and "Literaturkritik", literary criticism as to be found in the newspapers. A single word remained enough to speak of literary criticism in English.
Western canon
The term Western canon denotes a canon of books and, more broadly, music and art that have been the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the...
became the project of a new international competition. The Western nations defined themselves as "Kulturnationen" as exporters of a specific Western civilisation in the middle the second European colonization wave. To do this they eventually shared the same academic institutions that monitored, evaluated and basically organised their public controversies. Literature and culture had been topics the nations could hope to handle with more competence than religion. The "Republic of Letters
Republic of Letters
Republic of Letters is most commonly used to define intellectual communities in the late 17th and 18th century in Europe and America. It especially brought together the intellectuals of Age of Enlightenment, or "philosophes" as they were called in France...
", the "respublica literaria", the early modern scientific community
Scientific community
The scientific community consists of the total body of scientists, its relationships and interactions. It is normally divided into "sub-communities" each working on a particular field within science. Objectivity is expected to be achieved by the scientific method...
that had coined the term literature had definied itself as the first truly pluralistic institution. The universities it required would be state run and controlled by the respective nations.
The new topic spread in win-win situations. The publishing industry promoted fiction, literature, Belletristik. New authors profited from the exchange. The reading public eagerly followed the debate and was ready to identify with the greatest authors now produced.
New commercial rules began to structure the exchange. Most of the early 18th-century authors of fiction had published anonymously. They had offered their manuscripts and received all the payment to be expected for the manuscript. The new copyright laws
History of copyright law
The history of copyright law starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1709, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein...
introduced in the 18th and 19th centuries promised a profit share on all future editions and created a new strategy with the revolutionary work, readers would initially hardly understand. One would publish such a work in a small first edition hoping for critics to prove it into an eternal classic. Novelists, a scandalous branch of authors a century ago, assumed entirely new roles as public voices; they spoke as their nation's conscience, as national sages, as far sighted judges in newspapers, in public debates and in entirely new celebrations of their public status. The novelist who reads in theater halls and book shops is a 19th-century invention.
Fiction gained new qualities in the exchange. The literary market gave rise to difficult texts that could not hope to be understood without critical interpretations. New novels openly addressed the present political and social issues – sure to be discussed by media focusing on the same issues. Responsibility became a key issue: Responsibility of the citizen whose voice is heard or responsibility of the artist whose work future generations will have evaluate. The theoretical debate concentrated on the moral soundness of modern novels, on the integrity of individual artists, and on the provocative claims of aestheticists
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
such as Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
and Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
who proposed to write "art for art's sake
Art for art's sake
"Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
", that is with a responsibility the present audience and the present critics might not be able to understand.
The up-market of works deserving to be read as "literature" was matched by a growing market of "popular fictions", "trivial literature" – a market that discontinued the production of chapbooks and grew in the former field of elegant belles lettres. New institutions like the circulating library affected the market as platforms publishing houses would address with their first editions. Fiction became the object of a new mass reading public protected, monitored and analysed by nationwide debates and by institutions the new states would hope to control.
The developments did not lead to stable definitions of the terms it popularized. "Art", "literature" and "culture" became much rather the field of controversies authors, critics, and readers would feed in ever new attempts to find platforms for their interests. The exchange affected from now onwards children at school as much as intellectuals who risked their lives in public controversies.
Pushing art to its limits: Romanticism, 1770–1850
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
made direct reference to the art of romances. The genre, as opposed to the modern novel, experienced a revival with gothic fiction
Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
from Ann Radcliffe
Ann Radcliffe
Anne Radcliffe was an English author, and considered the pioneer of the gothic novel . Her style is romantic in its vivid descriptions of landscapes, and long travel scenes, yet the Gothic element is obvious through her use of the supernatural...
's "romance" The Mysteries of Udolpho
The Mysteries of Udolpho
The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, was published in four volumes on 8 May 1794 by G. G. and J. Robinson of London. The firm paid her £500 for the manuscript. The contract is housed at the University of Virginia Library. Her fourth and most popular novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho follows...
(1794) to M.G. Lewis' "romance" The Monk
The Monk
The Monk: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796. It was written before the author turned 20, in the space of 10 weeks.-Characters:...
(1795).
The new romances not only attacked the modern novel's "natural" depictions of life, they destabilized the very differentiation modern critics had been trying to establish between serious classical art and popular fiction. Gothic romances were grotesque. Their subject matter deserved less credit than the worst medieval tales of Arthurian knighthood. If the Amadis had troubled Don Quixote with curious fantasies, the new romantic tales were worse: they became nightmares, they explored sexual fantasies, they led to the end of human civilization.
The authors of this new type of fiction could be (and were) accused of exploiting all available topics to thrill, arouse or horrify their audience. These new romantic novelists could, at the same time, claim to explore the entire realm of fictionality. New–psychological–interpreters would read these works as encounters with the deeper hidden truth of the human imagination or the collective mind with all its recesses: sexual motives
Human sexuality
Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...
, anxieties
Angst
Angst is an English, German, Danish, Norwegian and Dutch word for fear or anxiety . It is used in English to describe an intense feeling of apprehension, anxiety or inner turmoil...
, and insatiable desires
Desire (emotion)
Desire is a sense of longing for a person or object or hoping for an outcome. Desire is the fire that sets action aflame. The same sense is expressed by emotions such as "craving" or "hankering". When a person desires something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the enjoyment or the...
. Under a psychological reading, novels were said to explore our deeper motives by moving into the field of art and by trying to reach and transgress its limitations. Artistic freedom would reveal what had not previously been openly visible: a theory that turned Huet's retrospective cultural description into an exploration of our options. The literary world started to recognize the fragment
Literary fragment
Literary fragments may comprise:* works inadvertently left unfinished or never completed by their authors* surviving extracts of larger works subsequently lost as wholes* works deliberately constructed as fragmentary pieces...
as art potentially surpassing all the works of intricate composition. Terror and kitsch entered the productions with explorations of the trivial.
The romantic fiction of de Sade
Marquis de Sade
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle...
, Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
and E. T. A. Hoffmann, their works from Les 120 Journées de Sodome (1785/1904), Die Elixiere des Teufels
Die Elixiere des Teufels
The Devil's Elixir is a novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Published in 1815, the basic idea for the story was adopted from Matthew Gregory Lewis's novel The Monk, which is itself mentioned in the text....
(1815), to Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
(1818), and the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) would later attract 20th-century psychoanalysts and supply the images of 20th and 21st century horror films, love romances
Romance novel
The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Through the late...
, fantasy
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
novels, role-playing
Role-playing game
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...
computer games and surrealist
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
art.
Important figures in romanticism include: Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, with his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables
Les Misérables
Les Misérables , translated variously from the French as The Miserable Ones, The Wretched, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, or The Victims), is an 1862 French novel by author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century...
(1862), and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, whose novel A Hero of Our Time
A Hero of Our Time
A Hero of Our Time is a novel by Mikhail Lermontov, written in 1839 and revised in 1841. It is an example of the superfluous man novel, noted for its compelling Byronic hero Pechorin and for the beautiful descriptions of the Caucasus...
(1840) is notable for introducing Superfluous man
Superfluous man
The Superfluous Man is a 19th century Russian literary concept. It relates to an individual, possibly of talent and capability, who does not fit into the state-centered pattern of employment. Often the individual is born into the upper class and is rich and affluent. He may pursue a military...
in the world of literature.
"Realism" and the reevaluation of the past and the present, 1790–1900
Grimmelshausen
Grimmelshausen is a municipality in the district of Hildburghausen, in Thuringia, Germany....
and Richard Head
Richard Head
Richard Head was an author, playwright and bookseller. He became famous with his satirical novel The English Rogue – one of the earliest novels in English that found a continental translation.-Life:The most important primary source on Head’s life is William Winstanley's biographical entry...
and in the hands of scandalous authors from de Courtilz de Sandras
Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras
Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras was a French novelist, journalist, pamphleteer and memorialist.His abundant output includes short stories, gallant letters, tales of historical love affairs , historical and political works, biographies and semi-fictional "memoirs" Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644,...
to the anonymous author of La Guerre d'Espagne (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1707).
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
's historical novel
Historical novel
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
Waverley
Waverley (novel)
Waverley is an 1814 historical novel by Sir Walter Scott. Initially published anonymously in 1814 as Scott's first venture into prose fiction, Waverley is often regarded as the first historical novel. It became so popular that Scott's later novels were advertised as being "by the author of...
(1814) broke with these traditions. Scott did not write to satisfy the audience with temporal escapism, nor did he threaten the boundaries between fact and fiction with his works, as Constantin de Renneville had done with his French Inquisition (1715). Scott's work remained a novel, a work of art. He used the art of imagination to re-evaluate history by rendering things, incidents and protagonists as only the novelist was allowed to do. His work remained historical fiction, yet it questioned existing historical perceptions. The special power was partly gained through research: Scott the novelist, resorted to documentary sources as any historian would have done, but as an artist he gave things a deeper significance. Attracting a far wider market than any historian could address, and rendering the past vividly, his work destabilized public perceptions of that past.
Most 19th-century authors hardly went beyond illustrating and supporting widespread historical views. The more interesting titles won fame by doing what no historian nor journalist would do: make the reader experience another life. Émile Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
's novels depicted the world of which Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
wrote in a non-fictional mode. Slavery in the United States, abolitionism
Abolitionism
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...
and racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...
's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman....
(1852), as whose characters provided personifications for topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract. Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
led the audience into contemporary British workhouses: his novels imitated firsthand accounts of child labour. War changed with Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
's War and Peace
War and Peace
War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature...
(1868/69) from historical fact to a world of personal fate. Crime became a personal reality with Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his...
(1866). Women authors had dominated the production of fiction from the 1640s into the early 18th century, but few before George Eliot
George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
so openly questioned the position of women, the precepts of their education, and their social position.
As the novel became the most interesting platform of modern debates–allegedly free, as art could claim to be in the modern secular western societies–a race began between nations to (re-)establish their national literatures with novels as the essential production that could link the present with the past. Alessandro Manzoni
Alessandro Manzoni
Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni was an Italian poet and novelist.He is famous for the novel The Betrothed , generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature...
's, I Promessi Sposi (1827) did this for Italy; Russia and the surrounding Slavonic brought forth their first novels; the Scandinavian countries entered the race.
With the new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. Samuel Madden
Samuel Madden
Samuel Madden was an Irish author. His works include Themistocles; The Lover of His Country, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, and Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Dr...
's Memoirs of the 20th century (1733) had been a satire, presenting a future that was basically the present age, but with the Jesuits secretly ruling the globe. Louis-Sébastien Mercier
Louis-Sébastien Mercier
Louis-Sébastien Mercier was a French dramatist and writer.-Early life and education:He was born in Paris to a humble family: his father was a skilled artisan who polished swords and metal arms. Mercier nevertheless received a decent education.-Literary career:Mercier began his literary career by...
‘s L'An 2440 (1771) had gone a step further and created an enlightened future, that one could establish immediately if only one dared to live according to better moral precepts. The step into a different future began with Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
's The Last Man
The Last Man
The Last Man is an apocalyptic science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The book tells of a future world that has been ravaged by a plague. The novel was harshly reviewed at the time, and was virtually unknown until a scholarly revival beginning in the 1960s...
(1826): a work whose plot culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague, even if it remained an autobiographical allegory of the authoress deploring her personal losses. Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamy was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, set in the year 2000. He was a very influential writer during the Gilded Age of United States history.-Early life:...
's Looking Backward
Looking Backward
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts; it was first published in 1887...
(1887) and H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
's The Time Machine
The Time Machine
The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895 for the first time and later adapted into at least two feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions, and a large number of comic book adaptations. It indirectly inspired many more works of fiction...
(1895) were, by contrast, marked by the idea of long term technological and biological developments. Industrialization, Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
divisions shaped these works and turned historical processes into a subject matter of wide debate: Bellamy's Looking Backward became the second best selling book of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher-Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Such works of scientific reflection inspired a whole genre of popular science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
as the 20th century approached.
Explorations of the self and the modern individual, 1790–1930
Individual
An individual is a person or any specific object or thing in a collection. Individuality is the state or quality of being an individual; a person separate from other persons and possessing his or her own needs, goals, and desires. Being self expressive...
, the potentially isolated hero, had stood at the centre of romantic fictions since the Middle Ages. The early novel(la) had placed the story itself at the centre: it was driven by plot, by incident and accident, rather than being the story of a single larger-than-life figure. And yet, the individual had returned with a wave of satirical romances and historical pseudo romances. Individuals such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Clarissa reintroduced the old romantic focus on the individual as the centre of what was to become the modern novel.
Ancient, medieval and early modern fictional characters lacked certain features that modern readers expect. Epics and romances created heroes, individuals who would fight against knight after knight, change (as an Assyrian princess) into men's clothes, survive alone on an island – while it would never see its personal experience as an individualizing factor. The early modern novelist had remained a historian as much as the author of the most personal French contemporary memoir. As soon as it came to relating the facts and experiences, it became a question of proper writing skills.
The modern individual changed. The rift can first be seen in the works of medieval mystics
Mysticism
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
and early modern Protestant autobiographers
Spiritual autobiography
Spiritual autobiography is a genre of non-fiction prose that dominated Protestant writing during the seventeenth century, particularly in England, particularly that of dissenters...
: moments in which they witnessed a change in their very experience of things, an inner isolation they would only be able to communicate to someone who had experienced the same. The sentimental experience created a new field of – secular, rather than religiously motivated – individualizations which immediately invited followers to join. Werther
The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787...
's step out of the value systems that surrounded him, his desperate search for the one and only soul to understand him, inspired an instantaneous European fashion. Napoleon
Napoleon I of France
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
told Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
he had read the volume about a dozen times; others were seen wearing breeches in Werther's colour to signal that they were experiencing the same exceptionalism. The novel proved the ideal medium for the new movements as it was ultimately written from an individual's point of view with the aim to unfold in the silence of another's individual mind.
The late 18th-century exploration of personal developments created room for depictions of personal experiences; it gained momentum with the romantic exploration of fictionality as a medium of creative imagination; and it gained a political edge with the 19th-century focus on history and the modern societies. The rift between the individual and his or her social environment had to have roots in personal developments which this individual shared with those around him or her, with his or her class or the entire nation. Any such rift had the power to criticize the collective histories the modern nations were just then producing. The new personal perceptions the protagonists of novels offered were on the other hand interesting as they could easily become part of the collective experience the modern nation had to create.
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
became the arena of such explorations of personal developments that separated the individual from, and then reunited it with, his or her social environment. Outsider perspectives became the field of mid-19th-century explorations. The artist's life had been an interesting topic before with the artist being by public definition the exceptional individual whose perceptions naturally enabled him to produce different views. Novels from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795-96. While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization...
(1795) to Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
's In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." The novel is widely...
(1913–1927) and James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, New York. The first English edition was published by the Egoist Press in February 1917...
(1916) created an entire genre of the Künstlerroman
Künstlerroman
A Künstlerroman , meaning "artist's novel" in German, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It may be classified as a specific sub-genre of Bildungsroman; such a work, usually a novel, tends to depict the conflicts of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his...
. Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
's Emma
Emma
Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-Regency England; she also creates a lively 'comedy of manners' among...
(1815), Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
's Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...
(1856), Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
's Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger...
(1873–77), and George Eliot
George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
's Middlemarch
Middlemarch
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans. It is her seventh novel, begun in 1869 and then put aside during the final illness of Thornton Lewes, the son of her companion George Henry Lewes...
(1871–72) brought female protagonists into the role of the outstanding observer. Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
's Oliver Twist
Oliver Twist
Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens, published by Richard Bentley in 1838. The story is about an orphan Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to...
(1839) and Gottfried Keller
Gottfried Keller
Gottfried Keller , a Swiss writer of German-language literature, was best known for his novel Green Henry .- Life and work :...
's Green Henry
Green Henry
Green Henry is a partially autobiographical novel by the Swiss author Gottfried Keller, first published in 1855, and extensively revised in 1880. The work stands with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer as one of the three most important examples of a...
(1855) focused on the perspectives of child
Child
Biologically, a child is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. Some vernacular definitions of a child include the fetus, as being an unborn child. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority...
ren, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his...
(1866) added a drop-out student who became a murderer to the spectrum of special observers whose views would promise reinterpretations of modern life.
The exploration of the individual's perception eventually revolutionized the very modes of writing fiction. The search for one's personal style stood in the centre of the competition among authors in the 19th century, now that novelists had become publicly celebrated minds. The destabilization of the author-text connection, which 20th century criticism was to propose later on, finally led to experiments with what had been the individual's voice so far – speaking through the author or portrayed by him. These options were to be widened with new concepts of what texts actually were with the beginning of the 20th century.
The novel and the global market of texts: 20th- and 21st-century developments
John Barth
John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.-Life:...
. Literature has not ended in "exhaustion" or in a silent "death"; nor have bound paper books been superseded by such new media as cinema, television or such new channels of distribution as the Internet or e-book
E-book
An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...
s. Novels such as the Harry Potter
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...
(1997–2007) books have created public sensation among an audience critics had seen as lost.
Novels were among the first material artefacts the Nazis burnt in public celebrations
Nazi book burnings
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the authorities of Nazi Germany to ceremonially burn all books in Germany which did not correspond with Nazi ideology.-The book-burning campaign:...
of their power in 1933; and they remained the very last thing they allowed their publishers to print as World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
ended in the devastation of central Europe: fiction could still be employed to keep the retreating troops in dream worlds of an idyllic homeland waiting for them. Novels were in the pockets of American soldiers who went to Vietnam and in the pockets of those who protested against the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
: Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's Steppenwolf
Steppenwolf (novel)
Steppenwolf is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining autobiographical and psychoanalytic elements, the novel was named after the lonesome wolf of the steppes...
and Carlos Castaneda
Carlos Castaneda
Carlos Castaneda was a Peruvian-born American anthropologist and author....
's Journey to Ixtlan
Journey to Ixtlan
is the third book by Carlos Castaneda. It was published as a work of non-fiction by Simon & Schuster in 1972.The title of this book is taken from an allegory that is recounted to Castaneda by his "benefactor" who is known to Carlos as Don Genaro , a close friend of his teacher don Juan Matus...
(1972) had become cult classics of inner resistance. While it was difficult to learn anything about Siberia's concentration camps in the strictly censored Soviet media, it was a novel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir . The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov...
(1962) and its proto-historic expansion The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp...
(1973) that eventually gave the world an inside view.
The novel remains both public and private. It is a public product of modern print culture even where it circulates in illegal samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
copies. It remains difficult to target. Totalitarian regimes can close down Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s, and control theatres, cinemas, radio and television stations, while individual paper copies of a novel can be smuggled into countries, defying strict censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
, and read there in cafés and parks almost as safely as at home. Its covers can be as inconspicuous as those of Iranian editions of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Prophet Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters...
(1988). An Orwellian
Orwellian
"Orwellian" describes the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free society...
regime would have to search households and to burn every retrievable copy: an engagement of distopian dimensions that only a novel, Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...
's Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury. The novel presents a future American society where reading is outlawed and firemen start fires to burn books...
(1953), would envisage.
The artefact that constituted one of the earliest flashpoints in the current cultural confrontation between the secular West and the Islamic East, Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1988), exemplifies almost all the advantages the modern novel has over its rivals. It is a work of epic dimensions no film maker could achieve, a work of privacy and individuality of perspective wherever it leads into the dream worlds of its protagonists, a work that uniquely anticipated ensuing political debates, and a work many Western critics classified as one of the greatest novels ever written. It is postmodernist in its ability to play with the entire field of literary traditions without ever sacrificing its topicality.
The democratic West depicted itself as the advocate of literature as the freest form of self-expression. The Islamic fundamentalist interpretation of the same confrontation has its own historical validity. This interpretation sees a conflict between Western secular nations and a postsecular
Postsecularism
Postsecularism is a theoretical concept whose central idea is that Western Secularism may have come to an end.-Literature:* During, Simon. "Toward the Postsecular". PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America: 120.3 , pp. 876–77.* McClure, John A.. Partial Faiths:...
religious world. In this view, the West has severed its religious roots and begun to idolize an arrangement of secular "pluralistic" debates. "Literature", "art", and "history" – the subject matter of the humanities – have become a Western substitute for religion. The Islamic republic eventually demonstrated how far the West had created its own inviolable if not sacred spheres in this development: Westerners can become atheists, they can admire any "blasphemy" as "art", but they cannot act with the same freedom in the field of history. Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
is criminalised in several Western nations in defence of secular pluralism. The Islamic nations protect, so goes the rationale, at the heart of the conflict a different hierarchy of discourses.
In a longer perspective, the conflict arose with the worldwide expansion of Western literary and cultural life in the 20th century. To look back, around 1700 fiction had been a small but virulent market of fashionable books in the sphere of public history. By contrast, in 19th century Europe the novel had become the center of a new literary debate. The 20th century began with the Western export of new global conflicts, new technologies of telecommunication
Telecommunication
Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...
and new industries. The new arrangement of the academic disciplines became a world standard. Within this system the humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
are the ensemble of subjects that evaluate and organise public debate, from art and literature to history. Former colonies and modern third world nations adopted this arrangement in their educational systems in order to pursue equal footing with the "leading" industrial nations. Literature entered their public spheres almost automatically as the arena of free personal expression and as a field of national pride in which one had to search for one's historical identity, as the Western nations had done before.
Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...
literary studies. The race was fueled by Western theories of cultural superiority: 20th-century critics such as Georg Lukács
Georg Lukács
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary...
and Ian Watt
Ian Watt
Ian Watt was a literary critic, literary historian and professor of English at Stanford University. His Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding is an important work in the history of the genre...
saw the novel as the form of self expression characteristic of the "modern Western individual". The worldwide spread of the novel was monitored and mentored by such Western institutions as the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
. The list of its laureates can be read as a chronicle of the gradual expansion of Western literary life. Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
was the first Indian poet and novelist to receive the prize in 1913, Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales was a Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan poet, novelist, playwright, journalist and diplomat...
received it in 1967, Japanese Yasunari Kawabata
Yasunari Kawabata
was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award...
in 1968, Colombian Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
in 1982; the Nigerian Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, where he was recognised as a man "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence", and became the first African in Africa and...
, honoured in 1986, became the first black African author to receive the award; the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism. He published over 50 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie...
became the first novelist of the Arab world to do so in 1988; Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk , generally known simply as Orhan Pamuk, is a Turkish novelist. He is also the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches comparative literature and writing....
, honoured in 2006, is a Turkish novelist.
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
.
Back in the early 18th century some 20–60 titles per year, that is between one and three percent of the total annual English production of about 2,000 titles, could be reckoned as fiction – a total of 20,000–60,000 copies on the assumption of standard print runs of about 1,000 copies. In 2001 fiction made about 11% of the 119,001 titles published in the UK consumer book market. The percentage has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, though the total numbers doubled from 5,992 in 1986 to 13,076 in 2001. The press output and the money made with fiction have risen disproportionately since the 18th century: According to Nielsen BookScan
Nielsen BookScan
Nielsen BookScan is a data provider for the book publishing industry, owned by the Nielsen Company. BookScan compiles point of sale data for book sales.-History:...
statistics published in 2009 UK publishers sold an estimated 236.8 million books in 2008. Adult fiction (an estimated 75.3 million copies) made 32% of this market. Children's, young adult and educational books, a section comprising best-sellers such as the Harry Potter volumes, made another 63.4 million copies, 27%. The total UK consumer market is supposed to have had a value £1,773m in 2008. Adult fiction made roughly a quarter of that value: £454m.
A vibrant literary life fuels the market. It unfolds in a complex interaction between authors, their publishing houses
Publishing
Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...
, the reading public, and a literary criticism of immense diversity voiced in the media and in the nation's educational systems. The latter provide through their branches of academic criticism many of the topics, the modes of discussion and to a good extent the experts themselves who teach and discuss literature in schools and in the media. Modern marketing of fiction reflects this complex interaction with an awareness of the specific reverberations a new title must find in order to reach a wider audience.
Different levels of communication mark successful modern novels as a result of the genre's present position in (or outside) literary debates. An elite exchange has developed between novelists and literary theorists, allowing for direct interactions between authors and critics. Authors who write literary criticism can eventually modify the very criteria under which theorists discuss their works. Literary recognition can also be gained when novels influence thinking about non-literary controversies. A third option remains with novels that find their audiences without the help of critical debate. Even serious novels can become the object of direct marketing strategies along the lines publishers usually reserve for "popular fiction".
Writing literary theory
Many of the techniques the novel developed over the past 100 years can be understood as the result of competition with the new 20th- (and 21st-) century mass media: film, comics and the World Wide Web shaped the novel. Shot and sequence, focusFocus (optics)
In geometrical optics, a focus, also called an image point, is the point where light rays originating from a point on the object converge. Although the focus is conceptually a point, physically the focus has a spatial extent, called the blur circle. This non-ideal focusing may be caused by...
and perspective
Perspective (visual)
Perspective, in context of vision and visual perception, is the way in which objects appear to the eye based on their spatial attributes; or their dimensions and the position of the eye relative to the objects...
have moved from film editing
Film editing
Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling...
to literary composition. Experimental 20th-century fiction is, at the same time, influenced by literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
.
Literary theory, arising in the 20th century, questioned key factors that had been matters of agreement in 19th-century literary criticism: the author wrote the text, he was influenced by his period, by an intellectual climate the nation provided and by his personality. The work of art eventually reflected all these aspects, and literary critics recreated them. The ensuing debate identified a canon of the truly great works brought forth by each nation.
20th-century literary theory challenged all these notions. It moved along with what philosophers called the linguistic turn
Linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language....
: the artifact to be read was primarily a text. The text unfolded a meaning in the reading process. The question was, what made the literary text so special? Its complexity: a simple answer that immediately called for a complex science to describe and to understand these complexities. The literary theorists argued that the literary criticism of the 19th century had not truly seen the text. It had concentrated on the author, his or her period, the culture that surrounded him or her, his or her psyche – factors outside the text, that had allegedly shaped it. Strict theorists argued that even the author, hitherto considered the central figure, whose message one wanted to understand, did not even have privileged access to the meaning and significance of his or her own work. Once the text was written it began to unfold associations, no matter whether one was its author or another reader. The theory debate stepped forth in redefinitions of its project: Formalism
Formalism (literature)
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...
(1900–1920), New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
(1920–1965), Structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
(1950–1980) and Poststructuralism (late 1960s through 1990s) became the major schools. The modes of analysis changed with each of these schools. All assumed that the text had its own meaning, independent of all authorial intentions and period backgrounds. If a monkey were to use a typewriter
Infinite monkey theorem
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare....
without any understanding of his actions, he would sooner or later produce a Shakespearean sonnet among his random texts, a text whose beauty and meaning we would be able to appreciate. Each of these schools proposed a criticism that directed its attention to an understanding of this inherent meaning.
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
(1922) became the central text that explored the potential of the new theoretical options. The 19th-century narrator left the stage; what remained was a text one could read as a reflex of thoughts. The "stream of consciousness" replaced the authorial voice. The characters endowed with these new voices had no firm ground from which to narrate. Their audiences had to re-create what was purposefully broken. One of the aims was to represent the reality of thoughts, sensations and conflicting perspectives. William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
was particularly concerned with recreating real life, an undertaking which he said was unattainable. Once the classical authorial voice was gone, the classical composition of the text could be questioned: Ulysses did that. The argumentative structure with which a narration used to make its points lost its importance. Each sentence connected to sentences readers recalled. Words reverberated in a worldwide circulation of texts and language. Critics would understand more of the possible allusions and supply them in footnotes.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
's trilogy Molloy
Molloy (novel)
Molloy is a novel by Samuel Beckett. The English translation is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.-Plot introduction:On first appearance the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name...
(1951), Malone Dies
Malone Dies
Malone Dies is a novel by Samuel Beckett. It was first published in 1951, in French, as Malone Meurt, and later translated into English by the author....
(1951) and The Unnamable
The Unnamable (novel)
The Unnamable is a 1953 novel by Samuel Beckett. It is the third and final entry in Beckett's "Trilogy" of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L'Innommable and later adapted by the author into English...
(1953), Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
's Rayuela (1963) and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
(1973) all explore this new narrative technique. Alfred Döblin
Alfred Döblin
Alfred Döblin was a German expressionist novelist, best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz .- 1878–1918:...
went in a slightly different direction with his Berlin Alexanderplatz
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Berlin Alexanderplatz is a novel by Alfred Döblin, published in 1929. The story concerns a small-time criminal, Franz Biberkopf, fresh from prison, who is drawn into the underworld. When his criminal mentor murders the prostitute whom Biberkopf has been relying on as an anchor, he realizes that...
(1929), where interspersed non-fictional text fragments enter the fictional sphere to create a new form of realism.
Authors of the 1960s–Robert Coover
Robert Coover
Robert Lowell Coover is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.-Life and works:...
is an example–fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental structuring concepts.
Postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
authors subverted the serious debate with playfulness. The new theorists' claim that art could never be original, that it always played with existing materials, that language basically recalled itself had been an accepted truth in the world of trivial literature. A postmodernist could reread trivial literature as the essential cultural production. The creative avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s "closed the gap" and recycled popular knowledge, conspiracy theories, comics and films to recombine these materials in what was to become art of entirely new qualities. Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
' 1950s analysis of popular culture, his late 1960s claim that the author was dead while the text continued to live, became standards of postmodern theory. Novels from Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel by Thomas Pynchon, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero...
(1966), to Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
's The Name of the Rose
The Name of the Rose
The Name of the Rose is the first novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
(1980) and Foucault's Pendulum
Foucault's Pendulum
Foucault's Pendulum is a novel by Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988; the translation into English by William Weaver appeared a year later....
(1989) opened themselves to a universe of intertextual
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
references while they thematized their own constructedness in a new postmodern metafictional awareness.
What separated these authors from 18th- and 19th-century predecessors who had invited other textual worlds into their own compositions, was the interaction the new authors sought with the field of literary criticism. 20th-century metafictional works expect literary historians to deal with them; literary critics and theorists become the privileged first readers that the new texts need in order to unfold. James Joyce is said to have said this about the reception he designed for his Ulysses (1922): "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." – a statement to which Salman Rushdie referred in 1999, according to Paul Brians's Notes for Satanic Verses:
Asked about the possibility of "Cliff's Notes" to his writings, Rushdie answered that although he didn't expect readers to get all the allusions in his works, he didn't think such notes would detract from the reading of them: "James Joyce once said after he had published Ulysses that he had given the professors work for many years to come; and I'm always looking for ways of employing professors, so I hope to have given them some work too."
Novelists such as John Barth
John Barth
John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.-Life:...
, Raymond Federman
Raymond Federman
Raymond Federman was a French–American novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. He held positions at the University at Buffalo from 1973 to 1999, when he was appointed Distinguished Emeritus Professor. Federman was a writer in the experimental style, one...
and Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
crossed the borders into criticism. Mixed forms of criticism and fiction appeared: "critifiction", a term Raymond Federman attempted to coin in 1993.
While the postmodern movement has been criticized at times as theoretical if not escapist, it successfully unfolded in several films of the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century: Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction (film)
Pulp Fiction is a 1994 American crime film directed by Quentin Tarantino, who co-wrote its screenplay with Roger Avary. The film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence, nonlinear storyline, and host of cinematic allusions and pop culture references...
(1994), Memento (2000), and The Matrix
The Matrix
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction-action film written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving...
(1999–2003) can be read as new textual constructs designed to prove that we are surrounded by virtual realities, by realities we construct out of circulating fragments, of images, concept, a language of cultural materials the new filmmakers explore.
Writing world history
     |
     |
On the one hand, media and institutions of criticism enable the modern novel to become the object of global debate. On the other hand, novels themselves, individual books, continue to arouse attention with unique personal and subjective narratives that challenge all circulating views of world history. Novels remain personal. Their authors remain independent individuals even where they become public figures, in contrast to historians and journalists who tend, by contrast, to assume official positions. The narrative style remains free and artistic, whereas modern history has by contrast almost entirely abandoned narration and turned to the critical debate of interpretations. Novels are seen as part of the realm of "art", defended as a realm of free and subjective self-expression. Crossovers into other genres – the novel as film, the film as novel, the amalgam of the novel and the comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
that led to the evolution of the graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
– have strengthened the genre's influence on the collective imagination and the arena of ongoing debates.
Personal realities have attracted 20th- and 21st-century novelists: first in an explicit reaction to the new science of psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, later, far more importantly, in a renewed interest in subject matter that almost automatically destabilizes and marginalizes the realities of "common sense" and collective history. Personal anxieties, daydreams, magic and hallucinatory experiences mushroomed in 20th-century novels. What would be a clinical psychosis
Psychosis
Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...
if stated as a personal experience – in one extreme example, Gregor Samsa, the point of view character of Kafka's
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
The Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely studied in colleges and universities across the western world...
, awakes to find that he has become a giant cockroach – will, as soon as it is transformed into a novel, become the object of competing literary interpretations, a metaphor, an image of the modern experience of personal instability and isolation. The term "Kafkaesque" has joined the term "Orwellian
Orwellian
"Orwellian" describes the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free society...
" in common parlance to refer not only to aspects of literature, but of the world.
Each generation of the 20th century saw its unique aspects expressed in novels. Germany's lost generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
veterans identified with the hero of Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was a German author, best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front.-Life and work:...
's All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.The...
(1928) (and with the tougher, more existentialist
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
rival Thor Goote created as a national socialist
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
alternative). The Jazz Age
Jazz Age
The Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged. The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war. This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depression but has...
found a voice in F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
and the incipient Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
in George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
. France's existentialism was prominently voiced in Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
' The Stranger
The Stranger (novel)
The Stranger or The Outsider is a novel by Albert Camus published in 1942. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of existentialism, though Camus did not consider himself an existentialist; in fact, its content explores various philosophical schools of thought, including absurdism, as...
(1942). The counterculture of the 1960s
Counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural movement that mainly developed in the United States and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam...
gave Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's Steppenwolf
Steppenwolf (novel)
Steppenwolf is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining autobiographical and psychoanalytic elements, the novel was named after the lonesome wolf of the steppes...
(1927) a new reception, while producing such iconic works of its own as Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey
Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a...
's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel written by Ken Kesey. Set in an Oregon asylum, the narrative serves as a study of the institutional process and the human mind, as well as a critique of Behaviorism and a celebration of humanistic principles. Written in 1959, the novel was adapted into a...
and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
. Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk
Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...
's Fight Club
Fight Club (novel)
Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. Inspired by his doctor's exasperated remark that insomnia is not suffering, he finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups...
(1996) became (with the help of the film adaptation) an icon of late 20th-century manhood and a reaction to the 20th-century production of female voices. Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
, Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH is a British writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos....
, Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."-...
became prominent female and feminist voices. Questions of racial and gender identities
Gender identity
A gender identity is the way in which an individual self-identifies with a gender category, for example, as being either a man or a woman, or in some cases being neither, which can be distinct from biological sex. Basic gender identity is usually formed by age three and is extremely difficult to...
, the option to reclaim female heroines of a predominantly male cultural industry have fascinated novelists over the last two decades with their potential to destabilize the preceding confrontations.
The major 20th-century social processes can be traced through the modern novel: the history of the sexual revolution
Sexual revolution
The sexual revolution was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the 1960s into the 1980s...
can be traced through the reception of sexually frank novels: D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
's Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy with assistance from Pino Orioli; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960...
had to be published in Italy in 1928; British censorship lifted its ban as late as 1960. Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
's Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Cancer (novel)
Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the...
(1934) created the comparable US scandal. Transgressive fiction from Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
's Lolita
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
(1955) to Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq , born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1958—or 1956 —on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French author, filmmaker and poet. To admirers he is a writer in the tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire;...
's Les Particules élémentaires
Les Particules Élémentaires
Atomised, also known as The Elementary Particles , is a novel by the French author Michel Houellebecq, published in France in 1998. It tells the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, and their mental struggles against their situations in modern society...
(1998) entered a literary field that eventually opened itself to the production of frankly pornographic works such as Anne Desclos' Story of O
Story of O
Story of O is an erotic novel published in 1954 about love, dominance and submission by French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage.Desclos did not reveal herself as the author for forty years after the initial publication...
(1954) to Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
's Delta of Venus
Delta of Venus
Delta of Venus is a book of short stories by Anaïs Nin. Though the stories were largely written in the 1940s while Nin was writing erotica for a private collector, the book was first published posthumously in 1978. In 1995 a film version of the book was directed by Zalman King. There are multiple...
(1978).
Crime
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
became a major subject of 20th- and 21st-century novelists. The extreme confrontations of crime fiction reach into the very realities that modern industrialized, organized societies try and fail to eradicate. Crime is also an intriguing personal and public subject: criminals each have their personal motivations and actions. Detectives, too, see their moral codes challenged. Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short-story writer most widely known for her psychological thrillers, which led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times, notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951...
's thrillers
Psychological thriller
Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the broad ranged thriller with heavy focus on characters. However, it often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre, along with the typical traits of the thriller genre...
became a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...
's New York Trilogy
The New York Trilogy
The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass , Ghosts and The Locked Room , it has since been collected into a single volume.- Plot introduction :...
(1985–1986) crossed the borders into the field of experimental postmodernist literature.
The major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries have inspired novelists. The events of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
found their reflections in novels from Günter Grass
Günter Grass
Günter Wilhelm Grass is a Nobel Prize-winning German author, poet, playwright, sculptor and artist.He was born in the Free City of Danzig...
' The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum is a 1959 novel by Günter Grass. The novel is the first book of Grass's .- Plot summary :The story revolves around the life of Oskar Matzerath, as narrated by himself when confined in a mental hospital during the years 1952-1954...
(1959) to Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller was a US satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His best known work is Catch-22, a novel about US servicemen during World War II...
's Catch-22
Catch-22
Catch-22 is a satirical, historical novel by the American author Joseph Heller. He began writing it in 1953, and the novel was first published in 1961. It is set during World War II in 1943 and is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century...
(1961). The ensuing cold war lives on in a bulk of spy novels
Spy fiction
Spy fiction, literature concerning the forms of espionage, was a sub-genre derived from the novel during the nineteenth century, which then evolved into a discrete genre before the First World War , when governments established modern intelligence agencies in the early twentieth century...
that reach out into the realm of popular fiction. Latin American self awareness in the wake of the (failing) left revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a "Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
", connected today with the names of Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
, Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...
and Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
and the invention of a special brand of postmodern magic realism
Magic realism
Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
. The unstable status of Israel and the Middle East have become the subject of Israeli and Arab perceptions. Contemporary fiction has explored the realities of the post-Soviet nations and those of post-Tiananmen
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...
China. Arguably, though, international perceptions of these events have been shaped more by images than words. The wave of modern media images has, in turn, merged with the novel in the form of graphic novels that both exploit and question the status of circulating visual materials. Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...
's two-volume Maus
Maus
Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman, is a biography of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek's life in Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek's later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of...
and, perhaps more important in its new theoretical approach, his In the Shadow of No Towers
In the Shadow of No Towers
In the Shadow of No Towers is a comic by Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist Art Spiegelman.-Overview:The comic evolved from Spiegelman's experiences during the September 11 terrorist attacks...
(2004) – a graphic novel questioning the reality of the images the 9/11 attacks have produced – are interesting artefacts here.
The extreme options of writing alternative histories have created genres of their own. Fantasy
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
has become a field of commercial fiction branching into the worlds of computer-animated role play and esoteric myth. Its center today is J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
's The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
(1954/55), a work that mutated from a book written for young readers in search of openly fictionalised role models into a cultural artefact of epic dimensions. Tolkien successfully revived northern European epic literature from Beowulf
Beowulf
Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...
and the North Germanic Edda
Edda
The term Edda applies to the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, both of which were written down in Iceland during the 13th century in Icelandic, although they contain material from earlier traditional sources, reaching into the Viking Age...
to the Arthurian Cycles
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
and turned their incompatible worlds into an epic of global confrontations that magically preceded all known confrontations.
Science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
has developed a broad variety of genres from the technological adventure Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
had made fashionable in the 1860s to new political and personal compositions. Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
's Brave New World
Brave New World
Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's fifth novel, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 , the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of...
(1932) has become a touchpoint for debate of Western consumerist societies and their use of modern technologies. George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...
(1949) focuses on the options of resistance under the eyes of public surveillance. Stanisław Lem, Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
and Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
became modern classical authors of experimental thought with a focus on the interaction between men and machines. A new wave of authors has added post-apocalyptic fantasies and explorations of virtual
Virtual
The term virtual is a concept applied in many fields with somewhat differing connotations, and also, differing denotations.The term has been defined in philosophy as "that which is not real" but may display the salient qualities of the real....
realities in crossovers into the commercial production of quickly mutating sci-fi genres. William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
's Neuromancer
Neuromancer
Neuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, a seminal work in the cyberpunk genre and the first winner of the science-fiction "triple crown" — the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy...
(1984) became a cult classic here and founded a new brand of cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
science fiction.
Writing for the market of popular fiction
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The contemporary market for trivial literature and popular fiction is connected to the market of "high" literature through the numerous genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
s that both fields share.
The historic advantage of genres is to allow the direct marketing of fiction. While the reader of "high" literature will follow public discussions of novels, the low production has to employ the traditionally more direct and short-term marketing strategies of open declarations of their content. Genres fill the gap the critic leaves and work as direct promises of a foreseeable reading pleasure. The very lowest stratum of trivial fiction is based entirely on genre expectations, which it fixes with serializations and identifiable brand names. Ghost writers hide behind collective pseudonyms to ensure the steady supply of fictions that will have the very same hero, the very same story arc, and the very same number of pages, issue after issue.
Though a production not promoted by secondary criticism it is trivial literature that holds the big market share. Romance fiction had an estimated $1.375 billion share in estimated revenue of the US book market in 2007. Religion/inspirational followed with $819 million, science fiction/fantasy with $700 million, mystery with $650 million and classic literary fiction with $466 million according to data supplied by the Romance Writers of America
Romance Writers of America
Romance Writers of America is a national non-profit genre writers association. It provides networking and support to individuals seriously pursuing a career in romance fiction and supports top authors such as Nora Roberts and Judith McNaught.-History:...
homepage.
The most important subgenres were in this period, according to Romance Writers of America data given on the basis of numbers of releases:
- Contemporary series romance: 25.7%
- Contemporary romanceContemporary romanceContemporary romance is a subgenre of romance novels, generally with the setting after World War II. The largest of the romance novel subgenres, contemporary romance novels are set in the time when they were written, and usually reflect the mores of their time...
: 21.8% - Historical romanceHistorical romanceHistorical romance is a subgenre of two literary genres, the romance novel and the historical novel.-Definition:Historical romance is set before World War II...
: 16% - Paranormal romanceParanormal romanceParanormal romance is a sub-genre of the romance novel. A type of speculative fiction, paranormal romance focuses on romance and includes elements beyond the range of scientific explanation, blending together themes from the genres of traditional fantasy, science fiction, or horror...
: 11.8% - Romantic suspense: 7.2%
- Inspirational romanceInspirational fictionInspirational fiction is a term that refers to a sub-category within "inspirational literature," or "inspirational writing," used in various ways in the United States and other nations...
: 7.1% - Romantic suspense (series): 4.7%
- Other (chick-lit, erotic romanceErotic romance novelsErotic romance novels are stories written about the development of a romantic relationship through sexual interaction. The sex is an inherent part of the story, character growth, and relationship development, and couldn’t be removed without damaging the storyline.-History:The subgenre got its start...
, women's fictionWomen's fictionWomen's fiction is an umbrella term for books that are marketed to female readers, and includes many mainstream novels, romantic fiction, "chick lit,"and other sub genres. It is distinct from Women's writing, which refers to literature written by women...
): 2.9% - Young adult romanceYoung Adult Romance Literature-Summary:Romance is a rapidly growing genre that has developed throughout the ages. The genre itself hasn’t changed over the years by a very large degree because the subject matter that appeals to the readers hasn’t changed much...
: 2.8%
In a historical perspective one could be tempted to see modern trivial literature as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both fields share a focus on readers in search of accessible reading satisfaction. Early modern booksellers stated a reduced vocabulary and a focus on plots as the advantages of the abridgements they sold. The market of chapbooks disappeared, however, in the course of the 19th century. The modern trivial production had by that time developed out of the once so elegant – early modern belles lettres.
The 20th-century love romance is a successor of the novels Madeleine de Scudéry
Madeleine de Scudéry
Madeleine de Scudéry , often known simply as Mademoiselle de Scudéry, was a French writer. She was the younger sister of author Georges de Scudéry.-Biography:...
, Marie de La Fayette, Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.-Early life:...
, and Eliza Haywood
Eliza Haywood
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood’s literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest...
wrote from the 1640s into the 1740s. The modern adventure novel
Adventure novel
The adventure novel is a genre of novels that has adventure, an exciting undertaking involving risk and physical danger, as its main theme.-History:...
goes back to Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
's Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...
(1719) and its immediate successors. Modern pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
has no precedent in the chapbook market; it goes back, again, to the libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, to John Cleland
John Cleland
John Cleland was an English novelist most famous and infamous as the author of Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure....
's Fanny Hill
Fanny Hill
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is an erotic novel by John Cleland first published in England in 1748...
(1749) and its companions of the elegant 18th-century market. Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
's James Bond
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
is a descendant of the anonymous yet extremely sophisticated and stylish narrator who mixed his love affairs with his political missions in La Guerre d'Espagne (1707). Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley was an American author of fantasy novels such as The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series. Many critics have noted a feminist perspective in her writing. Her first child, David R...
's The Mists of Avalon
The Mists of Avalon
The Mists of Avalon is a 1983 novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley, in which she relates the Arthurian legends from the perspective of the female characters.-Plot introduction:...
exploits Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature and its romantic 19th-century reflections. Modern horror fiction
Horror fiction
Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...
also has no precedent on the market of chapbooks – it goes back into the high market of early 19th-century romantic literature. Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history, hardly dating past the 1860s.
The emerging field of popular fiction immediately created its own stratifications with a production of bestselling authors such as Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
, Barbara Cartland
Barbara Cartland
Dame Barbara Hamilton Cartland, DBE, CStJ , was an English author, one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century...
, Ian Fleming, Johannes Mario Simmel
Johannes Mario Simmel
Johannes Mario Simmel was an Austrian writer.He was born in Vienna and grew up in Austria and England. He was trained as a chemical engineer and worked in research from 1943 to the end of World War II...
, Rosamunde Pilcher
Rosamunde Pilcher
Rosamunde Pilcher OBE is a British author of romance novels and mainstream women's fiction. Early in her career she was also published under the pen name Jane Fraser. Pilcher retired from writing in 2000.-Early years:...
, Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
, Ken Follett
Ken Follett
Ken Follett is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels. He has sold more than 100 million copies of his works. Four of his books have reached the number 1 ranking on the New York Times best-seller list: The Key to Rebecca, Lie Down with Lions, Triple, and World Without End.-Early...
, Patricia Cornwell
Patricia Cornwell
Patricia Cornwell is a contemporary American crime writer. She is widely known for writing a popular series of novels featuring the heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner.-Early life:...
, and Dan Brown
Dan Brown
Dan Brown is an American author of thriller fiction, best known for the 2003 bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. Brown's novels, which are treasure hunts set in a 24-hour time period, feature the recurring themes of cryptography, keys, symbols, codes, and conspiracy theories...
who enjoy the potential to attract fans and who appear as role models in author-fan relationships. The lowest market segment does not develop any mythologies of authorship. It hardly differentiates between hero and author: one buys the new Perry Rhodan
Perry Rhodan
Perry Rhodan is the name of a science fiction series published since 1961 in Germany, as well as the name of the main character. It is a space opera, dealing with several themes of science fiction. Having sold over one billion copies worldwide, it is the most successful science fiction book series...
, Captain Future
Captain Future
Captain Future is a science fictional hero pulp character originally published in self-titled American pulp magazines during the 1940s and early 50s.-Origins:...
, or Jerry Cotton
Jerry Cotton
Jerry Cotton is the fictional character in a series of crime novels by many different writers in German-speaking countries and in Finland.- Overview :...
.
Trivial literature has been accused of promoting escapism
Escapism
Escapism is mental diversion by means of entertainment or recreation, as an "escape" from the perceived unpleasant or banal aspects of daily life...
and reactionary
Reactionary
The term reactionary refers to viewpoints that seek to return to a previous state in a society. The term is meant to describe one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is "radical". While it has not been generally considered a term of praise it has been adopted as a self-description by...
politics. It is supposedly designed to reinforce present divisions of class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
, power and gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
. Nonetheless, popular fiction has dealt with almost any topic the modern public sphere has provided. Class and gender divisions are omnipresent in love stories: the majority of them harp on tragic confrontations that arise wherever a heroine of lower social status falls in love with a doctor, the wealthy heir of an estate or company, or just the Alpine farmer whose maid she happens to be. It is not said that these aspirations lead to happy endings. They can be read as escapist dreams of how one could change ones social status by marriage; they are at the same time constant indicators of existing or imaginary social barriers. All major political confrontations of the past one hundred years have become the scenery of trivial exploits, whether they focused on soldiers, spies or on civilians fighting between the lines. Conspiracy theories
Conspiracy fiction
The conspiracy thriller is a subgenre of thriller fiction. The protagonists of conspiracy thrillers are often journalists or amateur investigators who find themselves pulling on a small thread which unravels a vast conspiracy that ultimately goes "all the way to the top"...
have mushroomed under the covers of trivial fictions from Robert Ludlum
Robert Ludlum
Robert Ludlum was an American author of 23 thriller novels. The number of his books in print is estimated between 290–500 million copies. They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.-Life and...
's The Bourne Identity (1980) to Dan Brown
Dan Brown
Dan Brown is an American author of thriller fiction, best known for the 2003 bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. Brown's novels, which are treasure hunts set in a 24-hour time period, feature the recurring themes of cryptography, keys, symbols, codes, and conspiracy theories...
's The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery-detective novel written by Dan Brown. It follows symbologist Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu as they investigate a murder in Paris's Louvre Museum and discover a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus having been married to...
(2003): they mirror a widespread feeling that the electorate of the Western democracies receive at best an illusion of freedom, an omnipresent picture presented in the media, while those who pull the strings hide in the dark.
The authors of trivial fictions–and that is the essential functional difference between them and their counterparts in the sphere of "high" literature–tend to proclaim that they have simply exploited the controversial topics. Dan Brown does this on his website answering the question whether his Da Vinci Code could be called an "anti-Christian" novel:
No. This book is not anti-anything. It's a novel. I wrote this story in an effort to explore certain aspects of Christian history that interest me. The vast majority of devout Christians understand this fact and consider The Da Vinci Code an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate. Even so, a small but vocal group of individuals has proclaimed the story dangerous, heretical, and anti-Christian. While I regret having offended those individuals, I should mention that priests, nuns, and clergy contact me all the time to thank me for writing the novel. Many church officials are celebrating The Da Vinci Code because it has sparked renewed interest in important topics of faith and Christian history. It is important to remember that a reader does not have to agree with every word in the novel to use the book as a positive catalyst for introspection and exploration of our faith
The author of popular fictions has a fan community to serve and satisfy. He or she can risk rebuffing both the critical public and its literary experts in their search for interesting readings (as Dan Brown effectively does with his statement on possible readings of his novel). The trivial author's position towards his text is generally supposed to be relaxed. Authors of great literature are by contrast supposed to be compelled to write. They follow (says the popular mythology) their inner voices, a feeling for injustice, an urge to face a personal trauma, an artistic vision. The authors of trivial fictions have their own call: they must not fail the expectations of their audiences. A covenant of loyalty and mutual respect is the basis on which the author of popular fictions continues his or her work. The lower branches of the production have no contact to mythologies of authorship.
The boundaries between the so-called high and low have blurred in recent years through the explorations of postmodern and poststructuralist critics and through the exploitation of trivial works by the film industry. The present landscape of media – with television and the Internet indiscriminately reaching the entire audience – has a potential to destabilize boundaries between the fields. The division lines are, on the other hand, likely to stay intact as the critical discourse continues to need and to produce privileged objects of debate.
Genres of the novel
- AntinovelAntinovelAn antinovel is any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel. The term was coined by the French philosopher and critic Jean-Paul Sartre....
- AdventureAdventure novelThe adventure novel is a genre of novels that has adventure, an exciting undertaking involving risk and physical danger, as its main theme.-History:...
- BildungsromanBildungsromanIn literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
- CampusCampus novelA campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s...
- Comic
- Crime fictionCrime fictionCrime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
- Epistolary novelEpistolary novelAn epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
- FantasyFantasyFantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
- GothicGothic fictionGothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
- Historical novelHistorical novelAccording to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
- HorrorHorror fictionHorror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...
- KünstlerromanKünstlerromanA Künstlerroman , meaning "artist's novel" in German, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It may be classified as a specific sub-genre of Bildungsroman; such a work, usually a novel, tends to depict the conflicts of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his...
- Magic RealismMagic realismMagic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
- MetafictionMetafictionMetafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
- New novelNouveau romanThe nouveau roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new...
- ParanormalParanormalParanormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...
- Picaresque novelPicaresque novelThe picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society...
- Proletarian novelProletarian novelProletarian literature was centered on poor, working-class individuals, and was written during the period of 1930 to 1945. The adjective "proletarian" comes from the Latin words "prole , and , and is a term used to identify an individual of a lower social class identity. Often the group is...
- Psychological novelPsychological novelA psychological novel, also called psychological realism, is a work of prose fiction which places more than the usual amount of emphasis on interior characterization, and on the motives, circumstances, and internal action which springs from, and develops, external action...
- RomanceRomance novelThe romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Through the late...
- Science fictionScience fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
- SpeculativeSpeculative fictionSpeculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as...
- Spy
- SupernaturalSupernaturalThe supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...
- Thriller
- WesternsAmerican Old WestThe American Old West, or the Wild West, comprises the history, geography, people, lore, and cultural expression of life in the Western United States, most often referring to the latter half of the 19th century, between the American Civil War and the end of the century...
Literature
- EssayEssayAn essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
- FictionFictionFiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
- NoveletteNoveletteA novelette is a piece of short prose fiction. The distinction between a novelette and other literary forms is usually based upon word count, with a novelette being longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella...
- NovellaNovellaA novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
- Romance (genre)Romance (genre)As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
- Short storyShort storyA short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
- Novelette
- Fiction writingFiction writingFiction writing is any kind of writing that is not factual. Fictional writing most often takes the form of a story meant to convey an author's point of view or simply to entertain...
- List of literary movements
- LiteratureLiteratureLiterature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
- Street LiteratureStreet literatureStreet literature or broadsides began in the 16th century and continued until the mid-19th century as a type of printing of large printed sheets of paper, designed to be plastered onto walls...
Novels-related articles
- Byzantine novelByzantine novelThe Byzantine novel represents a revival of the ancient Greek romance of Roman times. Works in this category were written by Byzantine Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire during the 12th century.-History:...
- Chain novelChain novelA chain novel or chain story is written collectively by a group of authors. The novel is passed along from author to author, each adding a new chapter or section to the work, with the rule that each subsequent chapter or section should elaborate and follow the plotline of preceding chapters or...
- Debut novelDebut novelA debut novel is the first novel an author publishes. Debut novels are the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to publish in the future...
- First novel in EnglishFirst novel in EnglishThe following works of literature have each been claimed as the first novel in English.* Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur, * William Baldwin, Beware the Cat,...
- The Internet Book Database
- List of best-selling books
- Lists of books
- List of historical novels
- Live novel
- NaNoWriMoNaNoWriMoNational Novel Writing Month is an annual internet-based creative writing project which challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel between November 1 and November 30...
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". online edition
- 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. online edition
- 1702: Abbe Bellegarde, "Lettre à une Dame de la Cour, qui lui avoit demandé quelques Reflexions sur l'Histoire" in: Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale (La Haye: Adrian Moetjens, 1702). Paraphrase of Du Sieur's text. online edition
- 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. online edition
- 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. online edition
- 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. online edition
- 1718: Johann Friedrich Riederer, "Satyra von den Liebes-Romanen", from: Die abentheuerliche Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kappe, 2 (Nürnberg, 1718). German satire about the widespread reading of novels and romances. online edition
- 1742: Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews (London, 1742). The "comic epic in prose" and its poetics. online edition
Secondary literature
- Erwin RohdeErwin RohdeErwin Rohde was one of the great German classical scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries.Rohde was born in Hamburg and was the son of a doctor. Outside of antiquarian circles, Rohde is known today chiefly for his friendship and correspondence with fellow-philologist Friedrich Nietzsche...
Der Griechesche Roman und seine Vorläufer (1876) [un-superseded history of the ancient novel] - Bakhtin, Mikhail. About novel. 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 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.
- Ben Edwin Perry The Ancient Romances (Berkeley, 1967) review
- Burgess, Anthony (1970). "Novel, The" – classic Encyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaThe Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
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 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).
- Spencer, Jane, The Rise of Woman Novelists. From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford, 1986).
- 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).
- Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 revised edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). A market study of the novel around 1700 interpreting contemporary criticism.
- Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant: radicale ideeën in Nederlandse pornografische romans 1670–1700 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2002). ISBN 90-75697-89-9. from Leah PriceLeah PriceLeah Price is a professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, where her specialties are in the novel, literary journalism, the history of books and reading, and narrative theory, as well as on the culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries and British...
- 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.
- Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History. Continuum, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4411-7704-9