Encyclopedia
A
novel is an extended, generally
fictional narrative in prose. Until the
eighteenth century, the word referred specifically to short fictions of
love and intrigue as opposed to
romances, which were epic-length works about love and adventure. During the 18th century the novel adopted features of the old romance and became one of the major literary genres. It is today defined mostly by its ability to become the object of literary criticism demanding artistic merit, a specific 'literary' style and a deeper meaning than a true story of the same content could claim to have.
Novel and romance: unstable words
One meaning of the English word
novel has remained stable: "novel" can still signify what is new owing to its "novelty". When it comes to fiction, however, the meaning of the term has changed over time:
- The period 1200-1750 saw a rise of the novel rivaling the romance . This development, which one could describe as the first rise of the novel, occurred across Europe, though only the Spanish and the English went one step further and allowed the word novel to become their regular term for fictional narratives.
- The period 1700-1800 saw the rise of a "new romance" in reaction to the production of potentially scandalous novels. The movement encountered a complex situation in the English market, where the term "new romance" could hardly be ventured, after the novel had done so much to transform taste. The new genre also adopted the name novel: this new novel was a work of new epic proportions, with the effect that the English eventually needed a new word for the original short "novel": The term novella was created to fill the gap in English; "short story" brought a further refinement.
The meaning of the term
romance changed within the same complex process, becoming the word for a love story whether in life or fiction. Other meanings include the musicologist's genre "Romance" of a short and amiable piece, or
Romance languages for the languages derived from
Latin .
History
Traditions of prose fiction: the ancient world
- See also: Early novels
As
Pierre Daniel Huet noted in 1670, the tradition of epic works went back as far as
Virgil and
Homer. The regular format was verse, suiting the purpose of tradition in a culture of oral performances. Today, we see this tradition as going back even further, to the
epic of Gilgamesh, and in other cultures, to books such as the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata.
It is more difficult to speak of the influence of the shorter performances of regular
storytelling on the medieval traditions which led to the development of the novel/novella.
There was a third tradition of prose fictions, both in a
satirical mode and a heroic strain . The ancient Greek romance was revived by Byzantine novelists of the twelfth century. All these traditions were rediscovered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ultimately influencing the modern book market.
The romance, 1100-1500
The word
romance seems to have become the label of romantic fictions because of the "Romance" language in which early works of this genre were composed. The most fashionable genres developed in southern
France in the late twelfth century and spread east- and northwards with translations and individual national performances. Subject matter such as
Arthurian knighthood had already at that time traveled in the opposite direction, reaching southern France from Britain and French Brittany. As a consequence, it is particularly difficult to determine how much the early "romance" owed to
ancient Greek models and how much to northern folkloric verse epics such as
Beowulf and the
Nibelungenlied.
The standard plot of the early romance was a series of adventures. Following a plot framework as old as Heliodorus, and so durable as to be still alive in Hollywood movies, a hero would undergo a first set of adventures before he met his lady. A separation would follow, with a second set of adventures leading to a final reunion. Variations kept the genre alive. Unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th century [i] alliterative [i] romance [i] ...
. Classics of the romance developed such as the
Roman de la Rose is a late medieval [i] French [i] poem [i] styled as ...
, written first in French, and famous today in English thanks to the translation by
Geoffrey Chaucer.
These original "romances" were verse works, adopting a "high language" thought suitable for heroic deeds and to inspire the emulation of virtues; prose was considered "low", more suitable for satire). Verse allowed the culture of oral traditions to live on, yet it became the language of authors who carefully composed their texts — texts to be spread in writing, thus to preserve the careful artistic composition. The subjects were aristocratic. The textual tradition of ornamented and illustrated handwritten books afforded patronage by the aristocracy or by the monied urban class developing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for whom
knight errantry most clearly was a world of fiction and fantasy.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the emergence of the first prose romances along with a new book market. This market had developed even before the first printing facilities were introduced: prose authors could speak a new language, a language avoiding the repetition inherent in rhymes. Prose could risk a new rhythm and longer thoughts. Yet it needed the written book to preserve the coincidental formulations the author had chosen. While the
printing press was yet to arrive, the commercial book production trade had already begun. Legends, lives of saints and mystical visions in prose were the main object of the new market of prose productions. The urban elite and female readers in upper class households and monasteries read religious prose. Prose romances appeared as a new and expensive fashion in this market. They could only truly flourish with the invention of the printing press and with paper becoming a cheaper medium. Both of these achievements arrived in the late fifteenth century, when the old romance was already facing fierce competition from a number of shorter genres; most salient among these genres was the novel, a form that arose in the course of the fourteenth century.
The early novel, 1100-1600
It is difficult to give a full catalog of the genres that finally culminated — with the works of
Boccaccio,
Geoffrey Chaucer,
Niccolò Machiavelli and
Miguel de Cervantes — in the original "novel", the production today generally categorized under the term "novella".
The early novel was basically any story told for its spectacular or revealing incidents. The original environment — living on with the typical frame settings — was the entertaining conversation. Stories of grave incidents could just as well augment
sermons. Collections of examples facilitated the work of preachers in need of such illustrations. A fable could illustrate a moral conclusion; a short historical reflection could do the same. A competition of genres developed. Tastes and social status were decisive, if one believes the medieval collections. The working classes loved their own brand of drastic stories: stories of clever cheating, wit and ridicule levelled against hated social groups . Much of the original genre is still alive with the short
joke told in everyday life to make a certain humorous point in a conversation.
Artistic performances included the story within a story: situations in which a series of stories was allegedly told. They rejoiced in a broad pattern of tastes and genres.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer [i] in the 14th century [i] ...
constitute a classic example, with their noble storytellers fond of "romantic" stories and their lower narrators preferring stories of everyday life. The genre did not have its own generic term. "Novel" would simply denote the novelty of the accident narrated. The inclusion of frame stories, however, brought an awareness of the fact that genres were developing in this field.
The main advantage of the background story was the justification it put into the hands of the actual authors such as Chaucer and Boccaccio. Romances afforded lofty language and relied on an accepted notion of what deserved to be read as high style. Yet what if the taste in moral teachings and poetry changed? Romances quickly became outdated. Stories of cheats and pranks, illicit love affairs, and clever intrigues in which certain respectable professions or the citizens of another town were made fun of were, on the other hand, neither morally nor poetically justifiable. They carried their justification outside. The storyteller would offer a few words explaining why he thought this story was worth telling. Again, Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales afford the best examples: the real author could tell stories without any other justification than that this story gave a good portrait of the person who told it and of his or her taste, and that justification would remain stable throughout history.
If lofty performances grew tedious — as they did in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the old plots never leading to newer ones — the collections of tales or novels made it easy to criticise the lofty performances and to reduce their status: one of the group of narrators could start with the romantic story only to be interrupted by the other narrators listening within the story. They might silence him or order him to speak a language they liked, or they might ask him to speed up and to make his point. The result was a rise of the short genre. The steps of this development can be traced with the short story gaining in appreciation and value to rival romances in new versified collections at the end of the fourteenth century.
The conflict between novels and romances, 1600-1700
The invention of printing subjected both novels and romances to a first wave of trivialization and commercialization. Printed books were expensive, yet something people would buy, just as people still buy expensive things they can barely afford. Alphabetization, or the rise of
literacy, was a slow process when it came to writing skills, but was faster as far as reading skills were concerned. The
Protestant Reformation created new readers of religious pamphlets,
newspapers and
broadsheets.
The urban population learned to read, but did not aspire to participation in the world of letters. The market of
chapbooks developing with the printing press comprised both romances and short histories, tales and fables.
Woodcuts were the regular ornament and they were offered without much care. A romance in which the heroic knight had to fight more than ten duels within a few pages could get the same illustration of such a fight again and again if the printer's stock of standard illustrations was small. As their stocks grew, printers repeated the same illustrations in other books with similar plots, mixing these illustrations without respect to style. One can open eighteenth century chapbooks and find illustrations from the early years of printing next to much more modern ones.
Romances were reduced to cheap and abrupt plots resembling modern comic books; neither were the first collections of novels necessarily prestigious projects. They appeared with an enormous variety from folk tales over jests to stories told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, now venerable authors.
A more prestigious market of romances developed in the sixteenth century, with multi-volume works aiming at an audience which would subscribe to this production. The criticism levelled against romances by Chaucer's pilgrims grew in response to both trivialization and the extended multi-volume "romances". Romances like the
Amadis de Gaula led their readers into dream worlds of knighthood and fed them with ideals of a past no one could revitalize, or so the critics complained.
Italian authors like
Machiavelli were among those who brought the novel into a new format: while it remained a story of intrigue, ending in a surprising point, the observations were now much finer: how did the protagonists manage their intrigue? How did they keep their secrets, what did they do when others threatened to discover them?
The whole question of novels and romances became critical when
Cervantes added his
Novelas Exemplares to the two volumes of his
Don Quixote . The famous satirical romance was levelled against the
Amadis which had made Don Quixote lose his mind. Advocates of the lofty romance, however, would claim that the satirical counterpart of the old heroic romance could hardly teach anything:
Don Quixote neither offered a hero to be emulated nor did it satisfy with beautiful speeches; all it could do was to make fun of lofty ideals. The
Novelas Exemplares offered an alternative to the heroic and the satiric modes, yet critics were even less sure what to make of this production. Cervantes told stories of adultery, jealousy and crime. If these stories were to give examples, they gave examples of immoral actions. The advocates of the "novel" responded that their stories taught with both good and bad examples. The reader could still feel compassion and sympathy with the victims of crimes and intrigues, if evil examples were to be told.
The alternative to dubious novels and satirical romances were better, lofty romances: a production of romances modeled after Heliodorus arrived as a possible answer with excursions into the
bucolic world. Honoré d'Urfé's
L'Astrée became the most famous work of this type. The criticism that these romances had nothing to do with real life was answered through the device of the
roman à clef — one that, properly understood, alludes to characters in the real world. John Barclay's
Argenis appeared as a political
roman à clef. The romances of Madeleine de Scudéry gained greater influence with plots set in the ancient world and content taken from life. The famous author told stories of her friends in the literary circles of Paris and developed their fates from volume to volume of her serialized production. Readers of taste bought her books, as they offered the finest observation of human motives, characters taken from life, and excellent morals regarding how one should and should not behave if one wanted to succeed in public life and in the intimate circles she portrayed.
The novel went its own way:
Paul Scarron published the first volume of his
Roman Comique in 1651 with a plea for the development Cervantes had introduced in Spain. France should imitate the Spanish with little stories like those they called "novels". Scarron himself added numerous of such stories to his own work.
Twenty years later
Madame de La Fayette took the next decisive steps with her two novels. The first, her
Zayde , was a "Spanish history". Her second and more important novel appeared in 1678:
La Princesse de Clèves proved that France could actually produce novels of a particularly French taste. The Spanish enjoyed stories of proud Spaniards who fought duels to avenge their reputations. The French had a more refined taste with minute observation of human motives and behavior. The story was firmly a "novel" and not a "romance": a story of unparalleled female virtue, with a heroine who had had the chance to risk an illicit amour and not only withstood the temptation but made herself more unhappy by confessing her feelings to her husband. The gloom her story created was entirely new and sensational.
The regular novel took another turn. The late seventeenth century saw the emergence of a European market for scandal, with French books now appearing mostly in the Netherlands to be clandestinely imported back into France. The same production reached the neighboring markets of Germany and Britain, where it was welcomed both for its French style and its predominantly anti-French politics. The novel flourished in this market as the best genre to purport scandalous news. The authors claimed the stories they had to tell were true, told not for the sake of scandal but only for the moral lessons they gave. To prove this, they fictionalized the names of their characters and told these stories as if they were novels. . Journals of little stories appeared — the
Mercure Gallant became the most important. Collections of letters added to the market; these included more of these little stories and led to the development of the
epistolary novel in the late seventeenth century.
The novel had interested the English audience ever since Chaucer's days, it had been read in translations of Spanish and French novels throughout the 17th century. In the late 1680s English authors decided to create a modern English equivalent.
Aphra Behn and
William Congreve adopted the old term and wrote new "novels".
State of affairs: the market around 1700
Early eighteenth century novels and romances were still not considered part the world of learning, hence not of part of "
literature"; instead they were market goods. If one opened the term catalogues it was mostly situated in the predominantly political field of "History and Politicks" with some romances like Cervantes'
Don Quixote translated into verse becoming poetical. The integration of prose fiction into the market of histories appeared under the following scheme:
|
|
3.1
Heroical Romances:
Fénelon's Telemach |
|
|
1
Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of public affairs:
Manley's New Atalantis |
2
Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of private affairs:
Menantes' Satyrischer Roman |
3.2
Classics of the novel from the Arabian Nights to M. de La Fayette's Princesse de Clèves |
4
Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention:
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe |
5
Sold as true public history, risking to be read as romantic invention:
La Guerre d'Espagne
|
|
|
3.3
Satirical Romances:
Cervantes' Don Quixote |
from Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa, p.194 |
The centre of the market was held by fictions which claimed to be fictions and which were read as such. They comprised a high production of romances and, at the bottom end, an opposing production of satirical romances. In the centre, the novel had grown, with stories that were neither heroic nor predominantly satirical, yet mostly realistic, short and stimulating with their examples of human actions to be discussed.
Outside the centre, the market had two wings: On the left hand, one had books which claimed to be romances, but which threatened to be anything but fictitious. Delarivier Manley wrote the most famous of them, her
New Atalantis, full of stories the author claimed to have invented. The censors were helpless: Manley had hawked stories discrediting the ruling Whigs, yet should they ask the Whigs to prove that all these stories actually happened on British soil rather than on the fairytale island Atalantis? This was what they had to do if they wanted to sue the author. Delarivier Manley escaped the interrogations unscathed and continued her libellous work with three more volumes of the same ilk. Private stories appeared on the same market, creating a different genre of personal love and public battles over lost reputations.
On the other hand, one had a market of titles which claimed to be strictly non-fictional —
Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe is a novel [i] by Daniel Defoe [i], first published in 1719 and sometimes regarded a ...
became the most important of them. The genre-identification: "Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention" opened the preface:
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 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 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.
A production of histories of similar verisimilitude dove into the overtly political. Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras became the most important author in this field with his first version of d'Artagnan's
story, told again more than a century later by Alexandre Dumas the elder. Witty, and a distant precursor of Ian Fleming's fictional James Bond, is another book allegedly by his hand: La Guerre d'Espagne , the story of a disillusioned French spy, who gave insight into French politics, and into his own love affairs, with little intrigues he managed wherever he had to do his jobs. Fact and fiction were mixed in all these titles, to the point that one could no longer tell where the author had invented and where he had simply betrayed secrets.
The modern novel, a "new romance", 1700-1800
The early eighteenth century — with the novel diving into private and public scandal — had reached a state of affairs where a new reform seemed desirable. The old
Amadis could be said to have driven its readers into dream worlds, and the new novels, devoid of lofty speeches and incredible acts of heroism, had done much to refine taste. Yet they had created entirely new risks, with stories of love in which children cheated their parents, and with which private and public gossip were published on the open market.
Jane Barker was among the eighteenth century voices who demanded a return to the old antiquated romance. Her "new romance"
Exilius opened with the sketch of a new tradition: the romance had, so Jane Barker claimed, developed from Geoffrey Chaucer to
François Fénelon; the latter was the author who had just become famous with his epochal romance
Telemachus .
Fénelon's English publishers had carefully avoided the term "romance" and rather published a "new epic in prose" — so the prefaces. Jane Barker insisted, however, on publishing
Exilius as "New Romance [...] after the manner of
Telemachus", and failed on the market. In 1719 her publisher,
Edmund Curll, finally removed the old title pages and offered her works as a collection of novels.
The big market success of the next decade, Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe is a novel [i] by Daniel Defoe [i], first published in 1719 and sometimes regarded a ...
, appeared that very year and William Taylor, the publisher, avoided these traps with a title page claiming neither the realm of novels nor that of romances, but that of histories, yet with a page design tasting all too much of the "new romance" with which Fénelon had just become famous.
Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe was everything but a novel, as the term was understood at the time. It wasn't short, it didn't focus on an intrigue, and it wasn't told for the sake of a clear cut-point. Nor was Crusoe an
anti-hero of a satirical romance, though he spoke in the first person singular and had stumbled into all kinds of miseries. He did not really invite laughter . The feigned author was serious: against his will his life had brought him into this series of most romantic adventures. He had fallen into the hands of
pirates and survived years on an uninhabited island. He had survived all this — a mere sailor from
York — with exemplary heroism. If readers read his work as a romance, full of sheer invention, he could not blame them. He and his publisher knew that all he had to tell was strictly unbelievable, and yet they would claim it was true — this is the complex game which puts this work into the fourth column of the pattern above.
The classics market and the reform of the novel, 1700-1800
The publication of
Robinson Crusoe did not directly lead to the mid-18th century market reform. Crusoe's books were published as dubious histories; they played the game of the scandalous early eighteenth century market, with the novel fully integrated into the realm of histories. They even appeared reprinted by one of the London newspapers as a possibly true relation of facts. Philosophers like
Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned
Robinson Crusoe into a classic decades later, and it took another century before one could see Defoe's book as the first English "novel" — published, as Ian Watt saw it in 1957 — as an answer to the market of French romances.
The reform of the early eighteenth century market of novels came with the production of classics: 1720 saw the decisive edition of classics of the European novel published in London with titles from Machiavelli to Marie de Lafayette. Aphra Behn's "novels" had over the last decades appeared in collections of her works. The author of the 1680s had become a classic by now. Fénelon had become a classic years ago, as had Heliodorus. The works of Petronius and Longos appeared, equipped with prefaces which put them into the tradition of prose fiction Huet had defined. Prose fiction itself, according to the critics, had a history of ups and downs: having run into a crisis with the
Amadis, it found its remedy with the novel. It now needed continuous care. Yet, all in all, it could claim to be the most elegant part of the
belles lettres, the new market segment within the bigger market of literature, embracing the new classics.
Huet's
Traitté de l'origine des romans, first published in 1670 and now circulating in a number of translations and editions, won a central position among those writings which dealt with prose fiction. The
Treatise had created the first corpus of texts to be discussed and it had been the first title that demonstrated how one could "interpret" worldly fictions, just as a theologian would interpret parts of the gospel in a theological debate. The interpretation needed its aims, of course, and Huet had offered a number of questions one could ask: What did the fictional work of a foreign culture or distant period tell us about those who constructed the fiction? What were the cultural needs such stories answered? Are there fundamental anthropological premises which make us create fictional worlds? Did these fictions entertain, divert and instruct? Did they — as one could assume when reading ancient and medieval myths — just provide a substitute for better, more scientific knowledge, or did they add to the luxuries of life a particular culture enjoyed? The ancient Mediterranean erotic stories could afford such an interpretation.
The interpretation and analysis of classics placed readers of fictions in an entirely new and improved position: it made a vast difference whether you read a romance and got lost in a dream world or whether you read the same romance with a preface telling you more about the Greeks, Romans, or Arabs who produced titles like the
Aethopica or
The Book of One Thousand and One Nights is a medieval Middle-Eastern [i] literary epic [i] ...
.
To be discussed: the novel becomes literature, 1740-1800
The early eighteenth century market for classics of prose fiction inspired living authors. Aphra Behn, writing in relative anonymity, became a celebrated author posthumously. Fénelon achieved the same fame during his lifetime. Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker and
Eliza Haywood followed their famous French models who had dared to claim fame with their real names: the
Madame d'Aulnoy and Anne Marguerite Petit du Noyer. Most novels had previously been pseudonymous; now they became the productions of famous authors.
The discourse necessary to appreciate such a move towards responsibility was as yet underdeveloped. Journals discussing literature focussed on "learning", literature in the strict sense of the word. So far, most discussion of novels and romances had taken place within the field itself. Literary criticism, a critical, external discourse about poetry and fiction, arose only in the second half of the eighteenth century. It opened an interaction between separate participants in which novelists would write in order to be criticised and in which the public would observe the interaction between critics and authors. The new criticism of the late eighteenth century offered a reform by establishing a market of works worthy to be discussed . The result was a market division into a low field of popular fictions and a critical literary production. The latter, privileged works — those which rivalled ancient verse epics to be discussed as art, which played with the traditions of prose fiction , and which were of a clearly defined fictional status — these alone could be discussed as works created by an artist who wanted this and no other story to be discussed by the audience.
Design of title pages changed: new novels no longer pretended to sell fictions whilst threatening to betray real secrets. Nor did they appear as false "true histories". The new title pages pronounced their works to be fictions, and indicated how the public might discuss them.
Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was one of the titles which brought the novel-title, with its
[...], or [...] formula offering an example, into the new format: "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded – Now first published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes, A Narrative which has the Foundation in Truth and Nature; and at the same time that it agreeably entertains…" So the title page read, and made it clear that the work was crafted by an artist aiming at a certain effect, yet to be discussed by the critical audience. A decade later novels needed no status other than that of being novels: fiction. Present-day editions of novels simply state "Fiction" on the cover. It had become prestigious to be sold under the label, asking for discussion and thought.
Scandal as published by DuNoyer or Delarivier Manley vanished from the market of prose fiction — whether high or low culture. It could not attract serious critics and was lost if it remained undiscussed. It ultimately needed its own brand of scandalous journalism, which developed into the
yellow press. The low market of prose fiction went on to focus on immediate satisfaction of an audience enjoying its stay in the fictional world. The high market grew complex, with works playing new games.
In the high market, one could eventually see two traditions developing: one of works playing with the art of fiction —
Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy among them — the other closer to the prevailing discussions and moods of its audience. The great conflict of the nineteenth century, as to whether artists should write to satisfy the public or whether to produce art for art's sake, was yet to come.
Sentimentalism, psychology, and the new individual, 1750-1850
The mid- and late eighteenth century "novel of sentimentalism" produced an entirely new individual, one with a different attitude towards privacy and the public. Whereas the early eighteenth century heroine had been bold and ready to protect her reputation if necessary in a press war, her mid-18th century descendant was far too modest and shy to do the same. Early eighteenth century heroines had their secrets, they loved effective intrigues, they tried whatever they felt necessary to get what they wanted. Mid-18th century heroines developed a feeling of modesty. They suffered if they had to keep secrets and felt an urge to confess. They searched for friends and intimacy, for situations in which they could freely open their hearts and speak of their deepest wishes.
The eighteenth century audience saw these new heroes and heroines with amazement. When it came to their most secret wishes they dared to confide in their parents and friends — a trust which would have made them easy victims in the early eighteenth century world of fiction, libel, intrigue and scandal. Now, however, these weak heroines met an environment of compassion. Instead of making their affairs a public entertainment, the new heroes and heroines developed an intimacy into which the novel alone could take a careful look.
Special genres flourished with these protagonists who would not wash their dirty linen in public. Their letters or diaries were found and published only after their deaths. A wave of sentimentalism was the first result, leading to heroes like
Henry Mackenzie's
Man of Feeling . A second wave followed with more radical heroes who could no longer dream of an environment understanding them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's
The Sorrows of Young Werther is a loosely autobiographical [i] novel [i] by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [i] ...
was at the forefront of the new movement, and yielded a wave of compassion and understanding with readers ready to follow Werther into his suicide.
Critics embraced the new heroes as the best sign of a new literature which aimed at discussions. The understanding these heroes craved for afforded a secondary discussion — a discussion of the nature of the human psyche so much better observed by these new novels.
The novel, with these developments, had turned advocacy of individual and societal moral reform into a genre. With the
romantic movement beginning in the 1770s, the development went one step further: the novel became the medium of an
avant garde, the genre where emotions found their test cases. German authors developed the
Bildungsroman, a novel focussing on the development of the individual, their education and their way into individuality and society. New sciences like sociology to psychology developed along with the new individual and influenced the discussions surrounding the novel in the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth century: the novel as the object of great discussion
At the beginning of the seventeenth century the novel had been a genre of realism fighting the romance with its wild fantasies. The novel had turned first to scandal before undergoing reform over the last decades of the eighteenth century. Fiction eventually became the most honourable field of literature. This development culminated in a wave of novels of fantasy at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sensibility was heightened in these novels. Women, overwrought and prone to imagining worlds beyond their appointed one, became the heroines of the new world of "romances" and "
gothic novels" creating stories in distant times and places. Renaissance Italy was a favorite setting of the gothic novel.
The classic gothic novel is Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho . As in other gothic novels, the notion of the
sublime is central. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was
awful and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. Gothic characters and landscapes rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine the great exception. The "beautiful" heroine's susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hypersensibility.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the overwrought emotions of sensibility, as expressed through the gothic sublime, had run their course.
Jane Austen with
Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen [i]'s novels to be completed for publication, though s ...
parodied the gothic novel, reflecting its death. Moreover, while sensibility did not disappear, it was less valued. Austen introduced a different style of writing, the "comedy of manners". Her novels often are not only funny, but also scathingly critical of the restrictive, rural culture of the early nineteenth century. Her best known novel,
Pride and Prejudice belongs to the romantic-comedy genre and is the most famous of Jane Austen [i]'s ...
, is her happiest, and has been a blueprint for much subsequent romantic fiction. Austen's novels still retain a wide following, despite the distance between their heroines' dilemmas and those of the reader today.
Separation of high and low production
The market for novels in the nineteenth century was clearly separated into "high" and "low" production. The new high production can best be viewed in terms of national traditions. The low production was organized rather by genres in a pattern deriving from the spectrum of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genres.
- The novel as a literary production, promoted by critical discourse, separated by language and nation
- Spanish literature
- French literature
- German literature
- English literature
- Popular fiction, not promoted by criticism
- The modern roman à clef
- Sex, including soft "romantic" pornography for the female audience
- Historical settings , crime
- Adventure, science fiction
- Espionage, conspiracy
The position of authors attained its modern form with the establishment of this pattern. The modern author can either aim at a broad market or write with an eye to serious critical discussion. The borders between the realms have developed differently in different nations. While this modern market divide came relatively late to the English-speaking world, Germany and France had an earlier and much stronger interest in creating national literatures — France in the wake of the
French Revolution, Germany during its
mid-19th-century unification. Both of these nations experienced a division between high literature — discussed in schools and newspapers, and celebrated in public life — and a low production — not worthy to be mentioned in such circles — while the vast commercial market of the English-speaking world still resisted this artificial divide.
Here and there new author identities developed as the novel proved to be a perfect medium for a communication both intimate and public , a medium of a personal point of view which can get the world into its view. New modes of interaction between authors and the public reflected these developments: authors giving public readings, receiving prestigious prizes, giving interviews in the media and acting as their nations' consciences. This concept of the novelist as public figure arose in the course of the nineteenth century.
The twentieth century: from modernism to postmodernism
- See Modernist literature and Postmodern literature
Individual novels discussed
Classical antiquity
From Western antiquity — Greece and Rome — these are the earliest extant novels:
- Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus , a largely fictional account of the education of King Cyrus the Great of Persia; considered a precursor to the novel
- Petronius, Satyricon
- Apuleius, The Golden Ass
- Chariton, The Loves of Chaereas and Callirhoe
- Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon
- Longus, Daphnis and Chloe
- Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesian Tale by Xenophon of Ephesus [i] is a novel [i] ...
- Heliodorus, Ethiopian Tale
- Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca
- Joseph and Aseneth
- The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre
Asian works
Early important Asian novels include:
...
,
The Tale of Genji , arguably the first true novel, in the sense of a continued fictional narrative written by one author
- Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written by Lu Gunzhong [i] in the 14th century [i], is a Chinese historical novel [i] ...
- Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong, Water Margin or Outlaws of the Marsh is one of the Four Classical Novels [i] of Chinese literature [i] ...
- Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West is one of the Four Classical Novels [i] of Chinese literature [i]. ...
- Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as A Dream of Red Mansions, The Story of the S...
The thirteenth century
The fourteenth century
The fifteenth century
- Antoine de la Sale, Petit Jehan de Saintré
- Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur is Sir Thomas Malory [i]'s compilation of some French and English [i]...
- Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc, written by the Valencian [i] knight Joanot Martorell [i], finished ...
, a chivalric romance
The sixteenth century
- Jacopo Sannazaro, La Arcadia , a pastoral novel
- Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadis de Gaula
- Thomas More, Utopia
- François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
- Jorge de Montemayor, La Diana , a pastoral novel
- Lazarillo de Tormes is a Spanish novella [i], publis ...
- Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache
The seventeenth century
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha
- Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas Exemplares
- Francisco de Quevedo, El Buscón , the masterpiece of the picaresque sub-genre
- Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus was a satirical German [i] weekly magazine started by Albert Langen i...
, the Thirty Years' War put into satirical autobiography - Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister , the first full-blown epistolary novel
- Aphra Behn, Oroonoko is a short novel [i] by Aphra Behn [i], published in 1688 [i], concernin ...
The eighteenth century
- Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe is a novel [i] by Daniel Defoe [i], first published in 1719 and sometimes regarded a ...
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels , officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, is a novel by...
- Samuel Richardson, Pamela
- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones is a comic novel [i] by Henry Fielding [i]. ...
- John Cleland, Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- Voltaire, Candide
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
- Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was the last of the picaresque [i] novel [i]s of Tobias Smollett [i] ...
- Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Nicholas Experience
- Frances Burney, Evelina
- Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a famous French [i] epistolary novel [i] by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos [i]...
- Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
- Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney
The nineteenth century
Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his penname [i]
Stendhal, was a 19th century [i] French [i] ...
,
The Red and the Black is a novel [i] by Stendhal [i], published in 1830 [i]. ...
Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his penname [i]
Stendhal, was a 19th century [i] French [i] ...
,
The Charterhouse of Parma ...
,
The Betrothed is an Italian [i] historical novel [i] by Alessandro Manzoni [i]. ...
Anthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English [i] ...
,
Barchester Towers 
