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A novel (from the Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story of something new") is today a 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.
The definition of the term in the last two or three centuries has usually embraced several other criteria: artistic merit, fictional content, a design to create an epic totality of life, a focus on history and the individual.
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A novel (from the Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story of something new") is today a 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.
The definition of the term in the last two or three centuries has usually embraced several other criteria: artistic merit, fictional content, a design to create an epic totality of life, a focus on history and the individual. Critics and scholars have related the novel to several neighboring genres. On the one hand, it is related to public and private histories, such as the non-fiction memoir and the autobiography. On the other hand, the novel can be viewed as a form of art, to be evaluated critically in terms of the history of literature and calling for a specific sensitivity on the part of the reader to fully understand and properly appreciate it.
Definition
A novel is defined by a combination of its substance, its scope, its style, and that it can be located along a certain arc of the history of literature.
Fictionality
Fictionality is the feature most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion. Invented histories are not necessarily novels: lies, crypto- and pseudohistories, historical forgeries are fictional, and their form resembles that of histories, but they are not novels. Conversely, novels can develop an art of "realism" and can deal with history accurately to the point that they trigger a discussion of accepted historical views. They remain a form of art and creative invention as long as they offer:
- a "deeper", "eternal" truth (to be discussed not by historians but by literary critics),
- a narration addressing a private reader (historians are, since the 17th century, supposed to discuss critically rather than to pleasantly narrate historical facts),
- subject matter of private interest: love stories have been the main topic here throughout history.
Length and the epic depiction of life
The requirement that a novel be of a certain length dates only from the 19th century. It is connected today with the notion that novels (in contrast to the shorter novella) try to cope with the "totality of life".
17th-century critics had called for modern romances that adopted the features of the short novel. This development led both the Spanish and the English markets to turn the word for the shorter genre into the central generic term. The 18th-century reevaluation of extended works eventually reintroduced features of the old romance with the paradoxical result that modern criticism needed a new term for what had once been a novel. The lost synonym "novella" was eventually reintroduced to fill that gap. The separation of both genres remains a problem. When Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach was listed for the Booker Prize in 2005, critics stated that it had to be longer, and that it was at best a novella. On the other hand, it is difficult to call the 214-word work known as "Snoopy's novel" anything else. The text's attempt to create a picture of life in its totality makes it a (parody of a) novel under the present package requirement of length and approach.
Prose
Prose won the market over verse in Western Europe in the course of the 16th century. Both romances and novellas could be written in verse or prose. Prose proved advantageous on the early modern book market even before the arrival of the printing press: it was easier to translate; it was easier to read, especially if read in silence; and it was more convenient in a period of rapid language developments. The great vowel shift destroyed Geoffrey Chaucer's rhymes, whereas one could easily modernize prose sentences.
Composed and distributed in writing, using paper as the ideal medium
Whether in 11th-century Japan or 15th-century Europe, extended prose narratives ultimately needed both a written form and paper as a lightweight medium. Heavy, costly parchment manuscripts were the ideal medium of ornamented verse epics to be displayed when read aloud to an audience of listeners. They proved the owner's financial power to pay for the prestigious object. Prose allowed the production of inexpensive texts that the individual reader could readily use for his or her most private entertainment. The paper based book would be small and easy to carry around. Consequently, novels appeared mostly in handy formats such as duodecimo and octavo. Chapbooks would use quarto yet remain easy to carry as long as they did not exceed a hundred pages.
The novel's intricate intimacy on the print market
The novel, printed and sold on the regular book market, would be both private reading and an object of public circulation, but prior to the mid-18th century not the object of public discussion. One would buy the novel for one's private reading and know that the very same book had reached other readers: that you were part of an anonymous but shared intimacy. Scientific books were, by contrast, primarily read in libraries, which in the era of the novel's emergence meant at churches and universities. If read in privacy they would still be the object of a public debate in scientific journals, whereas novels remained a public secret. Reactions to novels were to be found within other novels, not in a public debate of literature (right into the 18th century, the very term "literature" referred only to written works in the sciences, not private materials such as poetry or fiction).
The silent and private reading of prose allowed indecent plots, discoveries, depictions of intimate and personal sensations, especially in the field of love. Verse epics had unfolded in semi public readings in front of audiences – a situation that required a certain discretion. Similar considerations applied to theatre. Books that were copied out one at a time required a copyist who would read every line. In contrast, a seller of published books could read them or not, and could be as private as anyone else about how familiar he was with their contents.
The novel's special literary style
The early modern book market created a demand for elegant written literary works under the rubric of belles lettres. This field included fiction, poetry and popular history in the modern languages, and was perceived as occupying a position between the realm of the sciences and that of lower popular books. Style was paramount. The essential features of what is today perceived as a literary style developed here and prose fiction—the romances and novels of the 17th century as well as the production of memoirs—set the fashions. Verse and rhetoric could hardly compete with fiction; the rules in both fields limited the room for experiments. Prose fiction was by contrast close to everyday language, to the private letter, to the art of refined "gallant" conversation. Huet summarised the stylistic ambition in his definition of modern prose fiction: "It must be compos'd with Art and Elegance, lest it should appear to be a rude undigested Mass, without Order or Beauty".
18th-century authors eventually criticized the French ideals of elegance the modern novel had adopted. A less aristocratic style of English reformed novels became the ideal.
The 19th and 20th centuries established a culture of public literary criticism and prestigious prizes to be granted to outstanding works and thus redefined the essential qualities of literary achievements. Stylistic experiments were the result. Beginning around 1830, critics began to value open-endedness, the work of art that can legitimately be a point of discussion and disagreement: certain types of ambiguity take on a positive value. Literary historians came to define great literature as that which adheres to certain standards of quality and fits into the history of literature, variously creating or reinforcing literary tradition, reworking literary tradition, or even reacting against prior literary tradition.
Literary awards play today a major role in the development of styles and canons. Most of these awards go to works by people of a particular nationality or works in a specific genre, thus reinforcing certain categories within the realm of the novel, creating separate canons.
History
Antecedents around the world
writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11the century, 17th-century depiction]]
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 almost entirely unaware of these works; instead they were influenced by novellas and verse epics.
Early works of extended fictional prose include the 11th-century Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, the 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (or Philosophus Autodidactus, the English 17th-century title) by Ibn Tufail, the 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, and the 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. 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 western novels. Nonetheless, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is 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 Sumerian 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 and early 19th centuries).
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (9th or 8th century BC), Vergil'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 Russian, 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 medieval romance and its rivals of shorter works
Romances, 1000–1500
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. The word novel claims roots in the European 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 and early 13th centuries. 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 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 a 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 saint's and virgin's 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 tradition of the novella, 1200–1600
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 into 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 rivaling lower genres such as the fabliaux. Individual story tellers would openly defend their tastes in a debate that grew into a metafictional consideration.
The cycles themselves showed advantages over the rival production of 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. Chaucer, the author of the Canterbury Tales, presented himself as the faithful chronicler of others' stories. The justification of prose fiction became a question of flexible argumentation. It no longer rested on the romancers' idea of eternal heroism, but on values the fictional narrators articulated, values the "real" author of the entire cycle could treat with 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 paratexts 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
looked back to the market of manuscripts.]]
Two developments of wider impact shaped the early modern production of fiction. Together they brought about the modern separation of the history and literature.
Looking back onto the early modern scope of histories mentalities seem to differ. The enlightenment seems to separate the 21st-century observer from early modern authors and readers of histories and fictions. Grossest improbabilities pervade many of the historical accounts of the early modern print market. Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1471), sold in William Caxton's edition of 1485 as 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 were 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 became 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 the gradual enlightenment. It stands at the same moment for a new arrangement of discourses the Western nations established beginning with the 1660s in new political journals and ensuing book publications. 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 tempotrarily 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 controllabe 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" in the modern sense of the word is the other. The very word finally changed its meaning from "the sciences" to "fiction and poetry". The main steps are here
- the creation of a field of elegant belles lettres in the 17th century,
- the focus on poetry and fiction in the course of the 18th century, and
- the final decision to read poetry, plays and fiction as "literature" at the beginning of the 19th century.
The modern nations won in this process a second field of essentially pluralistic controversies in which the interpretation and collective appreciation of texts gained a new and wider importance.
The novel developed from historical to fictional literature. Two major incidents guided this transition in the beginning: The medieval market of manuscript histories immediately degenerated on the early print market into a new trivial production of chap books. The elegant belles lettres rose as an alternative to this market. The Portuguese Amadis de Gaula made an spectacular and disastrous career in the new arrangements. It eventually provided the central notions of the "romance" against which the modern novel unfolded its wider pattern of genres—the pattern that finally turned prose fiction into a serious and interesting object of analysis and discussion at the beginning of the 18th 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 trivialization and commercialization. Romances had circulated in lavishly ornamented manuscripts. The printed book allowed a comparatively inexpensive alternative. Standard illustrations were repeated, often even within a single book, wherever the plot allowed such repetition. The copy texts were generally barely modernized. Literacy spread among the urban populations of Europe thanks to the Protestant Reformation, the arrival of religious pamphlets as its main medium, and thanks to the early modern news coverage in broadsheets and finally in newspapers. Writing skills were a different matter. They were initially the privilege of academics and of those who had to keep accounts for their shops, then spread as the personal letter became a favorite medium of communication among 17th-century men and women. This lag induced later scholars to suppose that the lower classes could barely read before the introduction of compulsory education in the 19th century.
The new market in printed materials sank, before a counter-movement of improved and elegantly printed books began to separate itself from it. It included ancient historians, popular medieval histories of knights, stories of comical heroes, religious legends and collections of jests and fables. 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:
At the afore-mentioned Place, all Country Chapmen may be furnished with all Sorts of Bibles, Commonprayers, Testaments, Psalters, Primers and Horn-books; Likewise all Sorts of three Sheets Histories, Penny Histories, and Sermons; and Choice of new and old Ballads, at reasonable Rates.
The quality standards of this production deteriorated whilst the audience was calling for ever cheaper versions of their favorite books. The market divide allowed for two separate sorts of books, elegant titles and old style titles, chapbooks. The low market eventually included abridgments of classy books from Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605/1615) to the 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 abridgments created a special connection to the high market, whilst the core production comprised many of the very titles with which the printed book had risen shortly after 1500. The illustrations began to show peculiar style mixes as the printer's stocks had grown: 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 gradual differentiation between fact and fiction barely touched this 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.
Heroic romances of style and fashion, 1530-1720
A process of diversification began as it became obvious that the market in printed books was to supplant the production of manuscripts entirely. By the 1530s there existed a section of literature (scientific books) addressing the academic audience, a section of virulent religious controversy and at least two fields of private reading comprising histories: one of cheap books, and one of elegance and style. A century later the second field was the arena of a rapid evolution of genres under the general heading of the belles lettres, polite literature, galante Wissenschaften (i.e. sciences addressing both sexes and all readers of taste). French books began to set the fashions in the 1620s. The belles lettres 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.
, Artamene (1654)]]
The evolution of prose fiction found its central critical debate with the publication of the Amadis de Gaula in the 1530s within the field of the belles lettres. 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, whilst 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.
Satirical romances, 1500-1780
, The English Rogue (1665)]]
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 Heads 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 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).
“Petit Histoires” or “novels”, 1600-1740
, Novelas Exemplares (1613)]]
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 the 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 “petit 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 fueled the rise of the novel/novella. The authors of modern journalistic gossip spiced their works with short anonymized 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 led to Eliza Haywood's epic length “novel” Love in Excess (1719/20) and then to Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741), essentially a novel with its typical two part title naming the story and promising its value as an example.
Dubious and scandalous histories, 1660-1720
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 catalogues had in stock for the entire production of pamphlets, memoirs, 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 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 production of novels, romances and dubious histories was, according to the modern advocates of the free press, not only embedded in the field of veritable critical histories: it had an important function to fulfill in that field. In a time when factuality was not a sufficient defence against a libel suit, it 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 but whether one would be able to establish critical discourses to evaluate all the interesting production.
The market of the late 17th and early 18th centuries 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:
Probably not that fictitious |
3.1
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) |
|
Prefaces and title pages of 17th- and early 18th-century fiction acknowledged this pattern: histories could claim to be romances, but threaten to relate true events, as in the roman à clef. 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's Robinson Crusoe was, within this pattern, neither “romance” nor “novel”. It smelled—with its title page alluding to Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699/1700)—of romance, whilst the preface stated that one (most certainly) read a true private history:
IF ever the Story of any private Man's Adventures in the World were worth making Pvblick, and were acceptable when Publish'd, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so.
The Wonders of this Man's Life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant; the Life of one Man being scarce capable of a greater Variety.
The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always ap[p]ly them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honor the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will.
The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch'd [later editions: disputed], that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.
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–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.
Whilst journalists continued to defended 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
classification of "fiction" and have to be seen as arbitrary identifications of "fictions". Searching for dubious histories and works written in what is today perceived as the "literary style" of novels one is likely to arrive at higher numbers.]] |
"The Rise of the Novel"
The 18th-century "rise of the novel" is a compound of several stories. One is the story of concepts and words. By the 1680s the "novel" had beaten the "romance". It was concise where the old romance had loved bombast. It had dismissed the implausible heroes of "romances" and turned to surprising yet not at all far fetched incidents. A genre of news and scandal, it reported the latest stories as they happened. Twenty years later, around 1700, the "novel" had become powerful enough to fuel a nostalgia for the once so virtuous production of "romances". Fénelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) exploited this nostalgia. By 1715 Jane Barker explicitly stated her aim to follow Fénelon's path and revive the old romance and with her Exilius: or, The Banish'd Roman. A new Romance [...] written after the Manner of Telemachus (1715).
Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719 on a market dominated by the modern novel(la). The book combined realism with the story of a man who experienced the life of a hero of romances against all his intentions. Its sequels and imitations did not, however, lead to a revival of the word "romance". Instead, the "novel" began to change. It gained a sub-production of venerable classics, and extended and finally far more virtuous "novels" developed with the works of Eliza Haywood and her successors.
The decades from 1720 to 1770 saw a consolidation of fiction. The question of terminology continued as one of genres. "Romance" laid its emphasis on invention, the "novel" on in the narration of present incidents: a balance the "romantic" movement restated with the wave of new dark and Gothic "romances". It was during this confrontation of genres that Robinson Crusoe finally became a "novel" at the end of the 18th century.
As genres, both the original "novel(la)" and the "romance" eventually contributed to the modern novel. The first contributed the focus on incidents to be discussed. The second contributed its interest in the actions of an exceptional individual and its heightened sense of art and fictionality.
Realism and art
The special advantage of the modern novel(la) in the 17th century was its realism: it rejected all romantic ideals, but often went beyond simulating real life incidents. Delarivier Manley's Atalantis threatened to relate the hidden truth of the private lives of prominent political figures—that was its scandal. Robinson Crusoe had appeared on a market dominated by the modern novel(la) with rather ambivalent promises of a romantic truth. In contrast to the modern "novels" of urban scandal, his story was as unrealistic and romantic as a private history could get. Crusoe did not, on the other hand, go back into the world of antiquated romances. The question on his reality and his veracity were as puzzling as René Auguste Constantin de Renneville's claims and reports of his eleven years in the Bastille. Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644–1712) had written comparably romantic fictions in which individuals had to face the "real" world in similarly incredibly situations. The newspaper The Original London Post, or Heathcot's Intelligence serialized Crusoe's story under the same dubious pretext of being a factual personal history that had been stated in the preface to the book.
Reaction to works such as these led to a widespread call for what would become a decisive 18th-century market reform: a field of substantial history was distinguished from a field of fictions. The former was a realm of scholarship and the sifting of historical materials. Works in the latter field would henceforth be analysed and praised by critics of "literature" (the word "literature" had to be redefined in this process.) 18th-century literary criticism eventually called for true works of art, for a definition of art as a realm of creativity opposing the realm of histories. Robinson Crusoe had to leave the twilight and to become a work of literature, where it met with the new appreciation Jean-Jacques Rousseau formulated in his Émile, ou De l'éducation in 1762.
Cultural status and place
During the rise of the novel, its place in the public sphere changed. The Provençal 12th-century romances and their imitations had fascinated an aristocratic audience and urban connoisseurs who had had the financial means to commission bigger manuscripts. In contrast, the early modern romance and its rival, the novel, reached the new and broader group that bought printed books. Spain set the fashions into the 1630s; French authors superseded Cervantes, de Quevedo, and Alemán in the 1640s. As Huet 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. Customers sought distinctly French authors to offer the authentic style of conversations in the new fashion.
French Inquisition (1715), the author's arrest.]]
By the 1660s this situation had slightly changed: the French market had split. Dutch publishers had begun 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 and Vivaldi 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 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.
By the 1680s the fashionable political European production had inspired a second wave of private scandalous publications. Women authors reported on politics and on their private love affairs in The Hague and in London. German students imitated them and used the relative anonymity they enjoyed in far smaller towns like Jena, Halle and Leipzig, to boast of their private amours in fiction. The market of the metropolis London, the anonymous international market of the Netherlands, the urban markets of Hamburg and Leipzig generated new public spheres. Once private individuals—students of university towns and daughters of London's upper class posing on the title pages anonymously under announcements like "Written by a Young Lady"—began to use the novel as platform on which they could openly reevaluate their questionable reputations, the public began to call for a reformation of manners.
The reform became the main goal of the second generation of 18th-century novelists who, by mid-century, openly welcomed the change of climate that had first been promoted in journals such as The Spectator (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 at the beginning of the century. New "literary journals" like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing'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 recogized 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.
Production quantities
The changes noted here led to an increase in the quantity of fiction produced in the course of the 18th century. English readers had been offered a total of some 2,000 to 3,000 titles per year since 1641, the year when strict censorship ended with the abolition of the Star Chamber. The numbers of titles published per year had peaked in years of hot political debate, whilst the number of works we can today read as literature—fiction and poetry—had remained relatively stable and marginal throughout that period. The market yielded some 20 to 60 novels per year around 1700 with numbers depending on how one defined the genre. In the second half of the century the growth became exponential, and it remained so. Fiction, highly discussed titles, and a wider production of trivial literature became central to the modern print market.
Legitimating the novel: World Classics, 1670-1830
Pierre Daniel Huet's Traitté de l'origine des romans (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 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, Lucian and Heliodorus of Emesa. 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 (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's to Marie de LaFayette's masterpieces.
Aphra Behn's prose fictions had appeared as "novels" in the 1680s and were reprinted in collections of her works which turned the scandalous authoress into a modern classic. Fénelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) 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 thus followed the footsteps of Aphra Behn in 1719 using her name with unprecedented pride.
"The reformation of manners", 1678–1790
The production of classics allowed the novel to gain a past, prestige and a canon. It called at the same moment for a present production of equal merits. A wave of mid-18th-century works that proclaimed their intent to propagate improved moral values gave critics modern novels they could discuss publicly. Instead of banning novels, the efforts at reformation of manners 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 and Delarivier Manley became notorious examples of a bygone age of impudence. They had washed their dirty linen in the 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 (1678) can be read as the first novel that showed the new behavior.
's Werther (1774).]]
To become a fashion, if not the standard of modern behavior, the new personality features needed new social environments. 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. Other novels experimented with surprising acts of an enlightened rationality 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's Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality, "Manon Lescaut" (1731), aroused a scandal with its melodramatic turns and its unresolved conflicts.
Samuel Richardson’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'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).
edition.]]
Male heroes adopted the new sentimental character traits in the 1760s. Laurence Sterne's Yorick, the hero of the Sentimental Journey (1768) did so with an enormous amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) produced the far more serious role models.
The virtuous production inspired a sub- and counterculture of pornographic 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's English Rogue (1665) had led their heroes through urban brothels, women authors like Aphra Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of the 19th-century femmes fatales—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's Fanny Hill (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's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The titular hero realised how impossible it had become for him to integrate into the new conformist society. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (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 began to fascinate novelists in the 1760s. Jean Jacques Rousseau's novels focused on such developments in philosophical experiments. The German Bildungsroman 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
, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, p.70-71 (1769)]]
The new 18th-century status of the novel as an object of debate is particularly manifest in special development of philosophical and experimental novels.
Philosophical fiction was not exactly new. Plato's dialogs were embedded in fictional narratives. Utopias had added to this production with works from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (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 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 (1752, English 1753). His Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759) became central texts of the French Enlightenment and of the modern novel. Jean-Jacques Rousseau bridged the genres with his less fictional Emile: or, On Education (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 metafictional experiment, pressing against its limitations. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (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's A Tale of a Tub (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
on the cover of L'Eclipse June 14, 1868 on his way across the English Channel.]]
By the beginning of the 19th century, prose fiction had moved from a field of questionable entertainment and precarious historicity into the centre of the new literary debate. The traditional task of literary historians, to review the sciences, was referred to professional academic journals. The evaluation of artistic merits and the interpretation of the fictions became the main work of the new literary historians who turned poetry, plays, novels and romances into "literature".
The change in status had been made possible partly by recent generations of authors who had provided such works to be reviewed. The audience was likely to buy what had been discussed and publicly evaluated in order to participate in the ongoing debates. New copyright laws made the new production financially attractive. Early 18th-century authors had been paid for their manuscripts; they basically received a share of the immediate profits expected from a single edition. The new laws allowed long term strategies of literary fame: the publication of small first editions that critics would first have to evaluate before they could expect to find a wider and more permanent circulation. Authors could begin to wait for their breakthroughs with a reasonable chance to make their profits in years to come.
The new public reception created a sphere of up-market works deserving to be read as "literature" whilst it allowed the ongoing fields of fiction to survive and to become the modern mass market of "popular fictions", "trivial literature". The developments resulted temporarily—at the beginning of the 19th century—in a division of three market levels: The old chapbooks survived into the 1820s. The modern trivial market had by that time evolved out of the once prestigious belles lettres. The celebrated great works of literature were on this market the new field that required new marketing platforms and an enormous amount of official and public support. The latter was provided profusely by the new institutions of literary life and national education the continental European nations established in the first half of the 19th century.
What made "literature"—fiction and poetry—such an attractive topic to promote was the impact literary life could win in the modern nations' cultural life. Germany's states embraced the new field of education in the first decades of the 19th century. That nation, which had neither a nationwide religion nor a unifying national political debate, had begun an intensified search for unifying topics a century earlier. The comparatively European decades of the Nine Years War (1689-1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and the Great Northern War (1700-1721) had left the intellectual elite disenchanted. At the end of the 1720s scholars from Gottsched to Bodmer and Breitinger had turned German-language poetry into a field that the entirety of German-speaking intellectuals could agree on as a common platform. By the 1750s it had become clear that the new debate was to become the essential activity of new "literary" journals and that it would include the modern novel. The events of the French Revolution finally turned the new object of debates into a serious secular alternative to the entire field of exchange that religions and territorial politics had previously dominated.
The individual German states and France adopted the new subject as part of the national school curriculum during the first decades of the 19th century. Practical reasons spoke for the new field. Whatever one had previously done with religious texts at schools and universities could be done just as well, if not more fascinatingly, with plays, poems and prose fiction. One could interpret these texts, read them to improve one's personality, acquire new ideals and a strengthened sense of morals as a reader of good literature. School education could implement the new text base in a continuation of all the traditional text-oriented classroom and teacher-pupil activities. The idea of a literary Western canon was a novelty and a transfer of the religious canon debates. Entirely new formats of appreciation of "literature" developed: authors were not only discussed in journals and newspapers. They began to give public readings of their latest novels and eventually assumed new roles as public voices. The novelist as an outstanding artist and as an individual could better that the party politician or the religious dignitary dare to assume the role as the national sage, the far sighted judge, the voice of the nation.
New histories of literature were written in order to formulate the fundamental lines of interpretation required by the new canons. They broke with the prior tradition of histories of the sciences and they broke with the traditions of previous histories of poetry. As narrative and interpretative projects they rather resembled Pierre Daniel Huet's 1670 History of Romances. What was different now was the national perspective: histories of literature would discuss the developments of the literary genres for individual nations and languages. The decisive history of German literature that created the model for numerous others, Georg Gottfried Gervinus' Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, appeared between 1835 and 1842. The decisive history of English literature was, by contrast, the work of a continental author Hippolyte Taine’s four volume Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863) arriving in English in 1864. It opened with a look back on the new definition of literature and with a statement of the importance literature, fiction, had gained through the developments:
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.
, the political novelist in the centre of the public outrage he unleashed (painting, 1898).]]
Great Britain had developed a commercial production of the belles lettres, independent from the Dutch and the Parisian trendsetting markets, at the beginning of the 18th century. It had turned Shakespeare into its author of supposedly eternal fame by the 1760s. A rediscovery of the past had followed, with such doubtful discoveries as the Ossian-fragments. The English word "literature", however, hardly gained its modern meaning as a compound of poetry and fiction before the 1870s. England had traditionally united state and church under one head. It had for the last two centuries enjoyed an open political exchange. Hence, the continental secularisation, the search for new national topics of debate was uninteresting in England. In the USA, a national canon of literary works was impossible until the 1840s: there simply was not a large enough volume of material. Due to these special situations, the market divide between trivial and great literature remained rather indistinct in the English speaking world. The commercial importance of fiction on the book market, its massive distribution through the new 19th century circulating libraries, the journalistic interest in discussing modern authors of plays and fiction, and the reforms of the educational systems of the second half of the 19th century remained incentives for the English speaking countries to follow the continental European path.
on trial in 1895.]]
Fiction eventually became "literature" in an arrangement of win-win situations. It suited the publishing houses. It suited the modern nations searching for new secular topics. It suited the advocates of improved morals—the new discussions of literature focused on questions of values and morals The 19th-century developments in Europe and the Americas preluded in all these aspects the 20th-century globalisation of Western literary life. It did, however, not culminate in comparable confrontations between "developed" secularised countries and "underdeveloped" religious regimes and downright dictatorships. The 19th-century European and North American implementation of literary life, and of fiction as its privileged platform, found hardly any resistance in the nations affected. They competed with each other as "Kulturnationen", as exporters of Western civilisation, and they shared the institutions that provided, monitored, evaluated and basically organised the new exchange. The new Literary life was rooted in the intellectual life the early modern “republic of letters”, the “respublica literaria”, the early modern scientific community, had generated on its own subject "literature", the sciences, since the 16th century. The 19th-century nations adopted the one public debate that had traditionally styled itself as free, democratic, "republican" throughout the last centuries. The material literary critics would discuss was new: a production of art. The discussion itself promised, however, to stay as open as it had always been. To change the topic from the sciences to plays, novels and poems was designed to generate a wider exchange and one of greater impact. The scientific organisation of the entire exchange promised all groups interested a say in the ensuing literary life.
The adoption of modern national literature as an academic subject became with this organisational background one of the first steps in a larger rearrangement of the sciences as disciplines. From the Middle Ages into the 18th century four sciences had been taught at Europe's universities: theology, law, medicine and philosophy. The new system offered natural sciences, sciences of modern technologies, social sciences and the humanities. The latter became the institutional roof of all the discussions of history and culture—a realm new authors of literature would be aware of from now on.
The developments did not lead to stable definitions of terms like "art", "literature" and "culture". They much rather ultilised and institutionalised the controversies these words generated. To this day, scholars and critics continue to debate what literature should be, which works are the most important, what defines the true work of art etc. The controversies of "art", "literature" and "culture" define the nations who adopted the new cultural exchange while they serve within these societies as platforms on which all groups can be expected to voice their topics and demands, both in new works of art and in the critical analysis of these works.
What was specific to the 19th-century debate was, in hindsight, its immense interest in fixing personal responsibilities. "Good works are those that will always leave room for new interpretations", is a common statement reflecting the strong link between literature and its public discussion. 19th-century artists would face a choice: to create works of higher quality, pursuing an eternal truth or merely to become mercenaries of present conflicts, functionaries of the commercial market fed by their works. The alternative of claiming one had to create "art for art's sake, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function....
" also threatened to turn into a battleground over responsibilities. How does one handle art "responsibly"? What are the "demands" of art? Does the author truly act on behalf of art, or is this a cheap excuse for otherwise offensive and irresponsible behavior? Aestheticists, promoters of "art for arts sake" such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, eventually headed the lists of irresponsible authors produced by 19th-century defenders of public morals.
Pushing art to its limits: Romanticism, 1770-1850
, ca. 1800.]]
The very word romanticism made direct reference to the art of romances. The genre, as opposed to the modern novel, experienced a revival with gothic fiction from Ann Radcliffe’s “romance” The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) to M.G. Lewis’ “romance” The Monk (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, anxieties, and insatiable desires. 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 fragment was allowed to become art surpassing all the works of intricate composition. Terror and kitsch entered the productions with explorations of the trivial.
The romantic fiction of de Sade, Poe, Mary Shelley and E. T. A. Hoffmann, their works from Les 120 Journées de Sodome (1785/1904), Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815), to Frankenstein (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, fantasy novels, role-playing computer games and surrealist art.
"Realism" and the reevaluation of the past and the present, 1790-1900
’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)]]
The ancient romancers most commonly wrote fiction about the remote past. The present had been the object of “curious” explorations in the hands of satirists like Grimmelshausen and Richard Head and in the hands of scandalous authors from de Courtilz de Sandras to the anonymous author of La Guerre d'Espagne (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1707).
’s War and Peace (1868/69)]]
s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870)]]
Walter Scott's historical novel Waverley (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 reevaluate 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’s novels depicted the world of which Marx and Engels wrote in a non-fictional mode. Slavery in the United States, abolitionism and racism became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), as whose characters provided personifications for topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract. Charles Dickens led the audience into contemporary British workhouses: his novels imitated firsthand accounts of child labour. War changed with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1868/69) from historical fact to a world of personal fate. Crime became a personal reality with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). Women authors had dominated the production of fiction from the 1640s into the early 1700s, but few before George Eliot 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’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’s Memoirs of the Twentieth 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‘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’s The Last Man (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's Looking Backward (1887) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) were, by contrast, marked by the idea of long term technological and biological developments. Industrialization, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Marx’s theory of class 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 as the 20th century approached.
Explorations of the self and the modern individual, 1790-1930
Wilhelm Meister (1795)]]
The individual, the potentially isolated hero, had stood at the centre of romantic fictions since the Middle Ages. The early novel(l)a 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 – whilst it would never see its personal experience as an individualizing factor. The early modern novelist had remained a historian as much as the author(ess) 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 and early modern Protestant autobiographers: 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’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 told Goethe he had read the volume about a dozen times; others were seen wearing breeches in Werther’s color 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.
(1913-1927) with handwritten revision notes by Marcel Proust.]]
The novel’s individual perspective allowed for personal reevaluations of the public historical perceptions and it allowed for personal developments that could still lead back into modern societies. The 19th-century Bildungsroman 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 (1795) to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) created an entire genre of the Künstlerroman. Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873-77), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) brought female protagonists into the role of the outstanding observer. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1839) and Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1855) focused on the perspectives of children, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) added the 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 20th century criticism was to proposed 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
, Jean Paul Sartre and Che Guevara meeting in Cuba, 1960]]
2008]]
Given the number of new editions and the place of the modern novel among the genres sold in bookshops today, the novel is far from the crisis predicted by critics such as John Barth (himself a novelist) or, more recently, Alvin Kernan. 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-books. Novels such as the Harry Potter (1997-2007) sequels have created public sensation among an audience critics had seen as lost.
Novels were among the first material artifacts the Nazis burnt in public celebrations of their power in 1933; and they remained the very last thing they allowed their publishers to print as World War II 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: Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan (1972) had become cult classics of inner resistance. Whilst it was difficult to learn anything about Siberia’s concentration camps in the strictly censored Soviet media, it was a novel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and its proto-historic expansion The Gulag Archipelago (1973) that eventually gave the world an inside view.
The novel remains both public and private. It a public product of modern print culture even where it circulates in illegal samizdat copies. It remains difficult to target. Totalitarian regimes can close down Internet service providers, and control theatres, cinemas, radio and television stations, whilst individual paper copies of a novel can be smuggled into countries, defying strict censorship, 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 (1989). An Orwellian regime would have to search households and to burn every retrievable copy: an engagement of utopian dimensions that only a novel, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), would envisage.
The artifact 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 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. But the "pluralistic" West also places limits on individuals’ free expression. Westerners can become atheists, they can accept any "blasphemy" as "art", but there are limitations on discourse about history. For example, in many countries it is illegal to deny the Holocaust. The Islamic nations protect a hierarchy of discourses in which religion has remained the sacred sphere. The West has created an alternative set of debates in which history and literature serve as the more or less restricted platforms of its, by contrast, secularized controversies.
In a longer perspective, the conflict arose with the world-wide 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 and new industries. The new arrangement of the academic disciplines became a world standard. Within this system the humanities 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.
. A complex interaction is organised by public and academic literary criticism as the central provider of discussions, education and media attention.]]
A number of literatures could challenge the West with traditions of their own: Chinese novels are older than any comparable Western works. Other regions of the world had to begin their traditions as the Slavonic and Scandinavian nations had done in the 19th-century's European competition: South Asia and Latin America joined the production of world literature at the beginning of the 20th century. The run for the first black African novel to be written by a black African author is today a topic of research in postcolonialist literary studies. The race was fueled by Western theories of cultural superiority: 20th-century critics such as Georg Lukács and Ian Watt 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. The list of its laureates can be read as a chronicle of the gradual expansion of Western literary life. Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian poet and novelist to receive the prize in 1913, Japanese Yasunari Kawabata received it in 1968, Columbian Gabriel García Márquez in 1982; the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, honoured in 1986, became the first black African author to receive the award; the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz became the first novelist of the Arab world to do so in 1988; Orhan Pamuk, honoured in 2006, was Turkish. The awards to Mahfouz and Pamuk were seen in their home countries as open interference by the Swedish Academy into their respective national politics. Mahfouz, one of the most important Muslim authors who defended Rushdie's Satanic Verses, was almost killed in an assassination attempt outside his home. Pamuk continues to criticize the official Turkish position towards the Armenian Genocide, a question relevant to the present debate over Accession of Turkey to the European Union.
The contemporary novel defends the significance it had won by the 1860s, and it has stepped beyond, into a new awareness of its public outreach. Nationwide debates can become international debates at any given moment. Today's novelists can address a worldwide public, with international institutions, prestigious prizes, and such far-reaching associations as the the worldwide association of writers P.E.N.. The exiled author, who is celebrated by the international audience whilst he or she is persecuted at home is a 20th-century (and now 21st-century) figure. The author as keeper of his or her nation’s conscience is a new cultural icon of the age of globalization.
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 abojut 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, focus and perspective have moved from film editing to literary composition. Experimental 20th-century fiction is, at the same time, influenced by literary theory.
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: 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 (1900-1920), New Criticism (1920-1965), 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 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.
, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)]]
James Joyce’s Ulysses (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 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 world-wide circulation of texts and language. Critics would understand more of the possible allusions and supply them in footnotes.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953), Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow (1973) all explore this new narrative technique. Alfred Döblin went in a slightly different direction with his Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), where interspersed non-fictional text fragments enter the fictional sphere to create a new form of realism.
Authors of the 1960s–Robert Coover is an example–fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental structuring concepts.
Postmodern 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 bridged 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’ 1950s analysis of popular culture, his late 1960s claim that the author was dead whilst the text continued to live, became standards of postmodern theory. Novels from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault's Pendulum (1989) opened themselves to a universe of intertextual 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 Salman Rushdie to which 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, Raymond Federman and Umberto Eco crossed the borders into criticism. Mixed forms of criticism and fiction appeared: “critifiction”, a term Raymond Federman attempted to coin in 1993.
Whilst the postmodern movement has been criticized at times as theoretical if not escapist, it successfully unfolded in several films of the 1990s and 2000s: Pulp Fiction (1994), Memento (2000), and The Matrix (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
, 1902]]
, Wladiwostok, 1995]]
, Buffalo, 2008]]
, Warsaw, 2008]]
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in a US Radio station, c.1940]]
, 2006]]
, Cologne, 2006]]
, Munich, 2004]]
, Salman Rushdie and Shimon Peres, New York City, 2008]]
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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 that led to the evolution of the graphic novel—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, 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 if stated as a personal experience—in one extreme example, Gregor Samsa, the point of view character of Kafka's Metamorphosis, 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” 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 of World War I veterans identified with the hero of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) (and with the tougher, more existentialist rival Thor Goote created as a national socialist alternative). The Jazz Age found a voice in F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Great Depression and the incipient Cold War in George Orwell. France's existentialism was prominently voiced in Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus' The Stranger (1942). The counterculture of the 1960s gave Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927) a new reception, while producing such iconic works of its own as Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (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, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek became prominent female and feminist voices. Questions of racial and gender identities, 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 can be traced through the reception of sexually frank novels: D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley’s Lover had to be published in Italy in 1928; British censorship lifted its ban as late as 1960. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) created the comparable US scandal. Transgressive fiction from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) to Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires (1998) entered a literary field that eventually opened itself to the production of frankly pornographic works such as Anne Desclos' Story of O (1954) to Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus (1978).
Crime 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's thrillers became a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (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 found their reflections in novels from Günter Grass' The Tin Drum (1959) to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961). The ensuing cold war lives on in a bulk of spy novels 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", connected today with the names of Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez and the invention of a special brand of postmodern magic realism. 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 China. Arguably, though, international perceptions of these events have been shaped more by images than words. The wave of modern media imageshas, 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's two-volume Maus and, perhaps more important in its new theoretical approach, his In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)—a graphic novel questioning the reality of the images the 9/11 attacks have produced—are interesting artifacts here.
The extreme options of writing alternative histories have created genres of their own. Fantasy 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's The Lord of the Rings (1954/55), a work that mutated from a book written for young readers in search of openly fictionalised role models into a cultural artifact of epic dimensions. Tolkien successfully revived northern European epic literature from Beowulf and the North Germanic Edda to the Arthurian Cycles and turned their incompatible worlds into an epic of global confrontations that magically preceded all known confrontations.
Science fiction has developed a broad variety of genres from the technological adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable in the 1880s to new political and personal compositions. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has become a touchpoint for debate of Western consumerist societies and their use of modern technologies. George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) focuses on the options of resistance under the eyes of public surveillance. Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke 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 realities in crossovers into the commercial production of quickly mutating sci-fi genres. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) became a cult classic here and founded a new brand of cyberpunk science fiction.
Writing for the market of popular fiction
s to be bought in a German supermarket, 2009]]
s in a German newspaper shop, 2009]]
The contemporary market for trivial literature and popular fiction is connected to the market of "high" literature through the numerous genres that both fields share.
The historic advantage of genres is to allow the direct marketing of fiction. Whilst 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 ("romance", "adventure", "crime fiction") 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.
A notable gap lies between the modern production of trivial fiction and 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 abridgments they sold. The early modern trivial production did not, however, evolve into modern market of trivial literature. It disappeared around 1800. The modern trivial production had arrived by then.
Modern trivial literature, as it is offered in the book stacks of train stations, supermarkets and newspaper shops, is basically a continuation of the entire production of the—once so elegant—early modern belles lettres. The 20th-century love romance is a successor of the novels Madeleine de Scudéry, Marie de La Fayette, Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood wrote from the 1640s into the 1740s. The modern adventure novel goes back to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its immediate successors. Modern pornography has no precedent in the chapbook market; it goes back, again, to the libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, to John Clelands Fanny Hill (1749) and its companions of the elegant 18th-century market. Ian Flemming’s James Bond 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’s The Mists of Avalon exploits Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature and its romantic 19th-century reflections. Modern horror fiction 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 modern trivial production can be said to be the result of the 19th-century constitution of “high literature”. Where “high literature” rose under the critical debates of literature, the production that failed to receive the same critical attention had to survive on the existing markets.
on the bookjacket of one of his novels]]
The emerging field of popular fiction immediately created its own stratifications with a production of bestselling authors such as Raymond Chandler, Barbara Cartland, Ian Fleming, Johannes Mario Simmel, Rosamunde Pilcher, Stephen King, Ken Follett, Patricia Cornwell, Dan Brown 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, Captain Future, or Jerry Cotton.
Trivial literature has been accused of promoting escapism and reactionary politics. It is supposedly designed to reinforce present divisions of class, power and gender. 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 have mushroomed under the covers of trivial fictions from Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980) to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003): they mirror a widespread feeling that the electorate of the Western democracies receive at best an illusion of freedom, a omnipresent picture presented in the media, whilst 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.
See also
Genres of the novel
Literature
Novels-related articles
Further reading
Contemporary views
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". 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 1718: [Johann Friedrich Riederer], "Satyra von den Liebes-Romanen", from: Die abentheuerliche Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kappe, 2 ([Nürnberg,] 1718). German satire about the wide spread reading of novels and romances. 1742: Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews (London, 1742). The "comic epic in prose" and its poetics.
Secondary literature
Der Griechesche Roman und seine Vorläufer (1876) [un-superseded history of the ancient novel] *Bakhtin, Mikhail. . 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 Britannica entry.Miller, H. K., G. S. (1970) Rousseau and Eric Rothstein, The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). ISBN 0-19-811697-7Arthur 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 0873385519Reconsidering 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). 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 PriceRousseau, George (2004). Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). ISBN 1-4039-3454-1Mentz, Steve, Romance for sale in early modern England: the rise of prose fiction (Aldershot [etc.]: Ashgate, 2006). ISBN 0-7546-5469-9Schultz, Lydia, "Flowing against the traditional stream: consciousness in Tillie Olsen's 'Tell Me a Riddle.'" Melus, 1997.Rubens, Robert, "A hundred years of fiction: 1896 to 1996. (The English Novel in the Twentieth Century, part 12)." Contemporary Review, December 1996.Anderson, John Dennis, "Student Companion to William Faulkner". Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. ISBN 0313334390To view three contemporary experimental novels, see http://bradmusil.kramernet.org
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