Novel: the story on HearLore

Novel

The word novel derives from the Italian novella, meaning a small story or news, which itself comes from the Latin novus, meaning new. This linguistic root reveals that the novel was originally conceived as a vessel for fresh, contemporary tales rather than the ancient epics that dominated earlier literature. The concept of the novel has a continuous and comprehensive history spanning about two thousand years, with its origins deeply embedded in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, the Medieval chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. Margaret Doody, a leading literary historian, argues that the novel has existed in some form for two millennia, challenging the notion that it is a purely modern invention. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel, proving that the genre has always been in flux, adapting to the cultural needs of its time. The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of the vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty, which lasted from 1368 to 1644, and the Qing dynasty, which followed from 1616 to 1911. An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain, a philosophical tale that would later influence European thought. Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press, which allowed for the mass production of these stories and the rise of a reading public that was not limited to the aristocracy. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, published the first part of his masterpiece in 1605, and is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. Literary historian Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel published in 1957, argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century with Robinson Crusoe, marking a shift towards realism and individual experience. Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media, including audio books, web novels, and ebooks, while graphic novels have emerged as a popular format with origins in the 19th century. The novel is a long, fictional narrative, usually written in prose, and published as a book, but its definition has expanded to include works that challenge the boundaries of what a story can be.

Chivalry And The First Novel

The modern European novel did not emerge until after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439, and the rise of the publishing industry over a century later. Long European works continued to be in poetry in the 16th century, but the shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century, with examples like the Romance of Flamenca. The Prose Lancelot or Vulgate Cycle also includes passages from that period, and this collection indirectly led to Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur of the early 1470s. Prose became increasingly attractive because it enabled writers to associate popular stories with serious histories traditionally composed in prose, and could also be more easily translated. Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic, satiric or burlesque intent. Romances reworked legends, fairy tales, and history, but by about 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in Don Quixote, published in 1605. Still, the modern image of the medieval is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the word medieval evokes knights, distressed damsels, dragons, and such tropes. The rise of the modern novel as an alternative to the chivalric romance began with the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote, which is often called the first great novel of world literature. It continued with Scarron's Roman Comique, the first part of which appeared in 1651, whose heroes noted the rivalry between French romances and the new Spanish genre. In Germany an early example of the novel is Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, published in 1668. Late 17th-century critics looked back on the history of prose fiction, proud of the generic shift that had taken place, leading towards the modern novel. The first perfect works in French were those of Scarron and Madame de La Fayette's Spanish history Zayde, published in 1670. The development finally led to her Princesse de Clèves, published in 1678, the first novel with what would become characteristic French subject matter. Europe witnessed the generic shift in the titles of works in French published in Holland, which supplied the international market and English publishers exploited the novel-romance controversy in the 1670s and 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. The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip and scandal fueled the rise of the novel. 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, fictionalized names were used with the true names in a separate key. The Mercure Gallant set the fashion in the 1670s. Collections of letters and memoirs appeared, and were filled with the intriguing new subject matter and the epistolary novel grew from this and led to the first full blown example of scandalous fiction in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, published in 1684, 1685, and 1687. Before the rise of the literary novel, reading novels had only been a form of entertainment.

What is the origin of the word novel?

The word novel derives from the Italian novella, meaning a small story or news, which itself comes from the Latin novus, meaning new.

When was the first part of Don Quixote published?

Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of his masterpiece Don Quixote in 1605.

Who wrote The Rise of the Novel and when was it published?

Literary historian Ian Watt wrote The Rise of the Novel, which was published in 1957.

When was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto published?

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, subtitled A Gothic Story, began in 1764.

When was James Joyce's Ulysses published?

James Joyce's Ulysses was published in 1922.

The Rise Of Realism

The idea of the rise of the novel in the 18th century is especially associated with Ian Watt's influential study The Rise of the Novel, published in 1957. In Watt's conception, a rise in fictional realism during the 18th century came to distinguish the novel from earlier prose narratives. The rise of the word novel at the cost of its rival, the romance, remained a Spanish and English phenomenon, and though readers all over Western Europe had welcomed the novel or short history as an alternative in the second half of the 17th century, only the English and the Spanish had openly discredited the romance. But the change of taste was brief and Fénelon's Telemachus, published in 1699 and 1700, already exploited a nostalgia for the old romances with their heroism and professed virtue. Jane Barker explicitly advertised her Exilius as A new Romance, written after the Manner of Telemachus, in 1715. Robinson Crusoe spoke of his own story as a romance, though in the preface to the third volume, published in 1720, Defoe attacks all who said that the Story is feign'd, that the Names are borrow'd, and that it is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place. The late 18th century brought an answer with the Romantic Movement's readiness to reclaim the word romance, with the gothic romance, and the historical novels of Walter Scott. Robinson Crusoe now became a novel in this period, that is a work of the new realistic fiction created in the 18th century. The sentimental novel relied on emotional responses, and feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action. The result is a valorization of fine feeling, displaying the characters as models of refined, sensitive emotional affect. The ability to display such feelings was thought at this time to show character and experience, and to help shape positive social life and relationships. An example of this genre is Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, composed to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes, which focuses on a potential victim, a heroine that has all the modern virtues and who is vulnerable because her low social status and her occupation as servant of a libertine who falls in love with her. She, however, ends in reforming her antagonist. Male heroes adopted the new sentimental character traits in the 1760s. Laurence Sterne's Yorick, the hero of the Sentimental Journey, published in 1768, did so with an enormous amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, published in 1766, and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, published in 1771, produced the far more serious role models. These works inspired a sub- and counterculture of pornographic novels, for which Greek and Latin authors in translations had provided elegant models from the last century. The elegant and clearly fashionable edition of The Works of Lucian, published in 1711, would thus include the story of Lucian's Ass. Pornography includes John Cleland's Fanny Hill, published in 1748, which offered an almost exact reversal of the plot of novels that emphasise virtue. The prostitute Fanny Hill learns to enjoy her work and establishes herself as a free and economically independent individual, in editions one could only expect to buy under the counter. Less virtuous protagonists can also be found in satirical novels, like Richard Head's English Rogue, published in 1665, that feature brothels, while women authors like Aphra Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of the 19th-century femmes fatales. The genre evolves in the 1770s with, for example, Werther in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, realising that it is impossible for him to integrate into the new conformist society, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in Les Liaisons dangereuses, published in 1782, showing a group of aristocrats playing games of intrigue and amorality.

Romance And The Victorian Age

The very word romanticism is connected to the idea of romance, and the romance genre experienced a revival, at the end of the 18th century, with gothic fiction, that began in 1764 with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, subtitled in its second edition A Gothic Story. Subsequent important gothic works are Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794, and Monk Lewis's The Monk, published in 1796. The new romances challenged the idea that the novel involved a realistic depiction of life, and destabilized the difference the critics had been trying to establish, between serious classical art and popular fiction. Gothic romances exploited the grotesque, and some critics thought that their subject matter deserved less credit than the worst medieval tales of Arthurian knighthood. The authors of this new type of fiction were accused of exploiting all available topics to thrill, arouse, or horrify their audience. These new romantic novelists, however, claimed that they were exploring the entire realm of fictionality. And psychological interpreters, in the early 19th century, read these works as encounters with the deeper hidden truth of the human imagination: this included sexuality, anxieties, and insatiable desires. Under such readings, novels were described as exploring deeper human motives, and it was suggested that such artistic freedom would reveal what had not previously been openly visible. The romances of de Sade, Les 120 Journées de Sodome, published in 1785, Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, published in 1840, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, and E.T.A. Hoffmann's Die Elixiere des Teufels, published in 1815, would later attract 20th-century psychoanalysts and supply the images for 20th- and 21st-century horror films, love romances, fantasy novels, role-playing computer games, and the surrealists. The historical romance was also important at this time. But, while earlier writers of these romances paid little attention to historical reality, Walter Scott's historical novel Waverley, published in 1814, broke with this tradition, and he invented the true historical novel. At the same time he was influenced by gothic romance, and had collaborated in 1801 with Monk Lewis on Tales of Wonder. With his Waverley novels Scott hoped to do for the Scottish border what Goethe and other German poets had done for the Middle Ages, and make its past live again in modern romance. Scott's novels are in the mode he himself defined as romance, the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents. He used his imagination to re-evaluate history by rendering things, incidents and protagonists in the way only the novelist could do. His work remained historical fiction, yet it questioned existing historical perceptions. The use of historical research was an important tool: Scott, the novelist, resorted to documentary sources as any historian would have done, but as a romantic he gave his subject a deeper imaginative and emotional significance. By combining research with marvelous and uncommon incidents, Scott attracted a far wider market than any historian could, and was the most famous novelist of his generation, throughout Europe. In the 19th century, the relationship between authors, publishers, and readers changed. Authors originally had only received payment for their manuscript, however, changes in copyright laws, which began in the 18th and continued into the 19th century, promised royalties on all future editions. Another change in the 19th century was that novelists began to read their works in theaters, halls, and bookshops. Also during the nineteenth century the market for popular fiction grew, and competed with works of literature. New institutions like the circulating library created a new market with a mass reading public. Another difference was that novels began to deal with more difficult subjects, including current political and social issues, that were being discussed in newspapers and magazines. Under the influence of social critics like Thomas Carlyle, the idea of social responsibility became a key subject, whether of the citizen, or of the artist, with the theoretical debate concentrating on questions around the moral soundness of the modern novel. Questions about artistic integrity, as well as aesthetics, including the idea of art for art's sake, proposed by writers like Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were also important. Major British writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were influenced by the romance genre tradition of the novel, which had been revitalized during the Romantic period. The Brontë sisters were notable mid-19th-century authors in this tradition, with Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Publishing at the very end of the 19th century, Joseph Conrad has been called a supreme romancer. In America the romance proved to be a serious, flexible, and successful medium for the exploration of philosophical ideas and attitudes. Notable examples include Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. A number of European novelists were similarly influenced during this period by the earlier romance tradition, along with the Romanticism, including Victor Hugo, with novels like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, published in 1831, and Les Misérables, published in 1862, and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov with A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840. Many 19th-century authors dealt with significant social matters. Émile Zola's novels depicted the world of the working classes, which Marx and Engels's non-fiction explores. In the United States slavery and racism became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, which dramatizes topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract. Charles Dickens' novels led his readers into contemporary workhouses, and provided first-hand accounts of child labor. The treatment of the subject of war changed with Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, published in 1868 and 1869, where he questions the facts provided by historians. Similarly the treatment of crime is very different in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, where the point of view is that of a criminal. Women authors had dominated fiction from the 1640s into the early 18th century, but few before George Eliot so openly questioned the role, education, and status of women in society, as she did. As the novel became a platform of modern debate, national literatures were developed that link the present with the past in the form of the historical novel. Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, published in 1827, did this for Italy, while novelists in Russia and the surrounding Slavonic countries, as well as Scandinavia, did likewise. Along with this new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. This had been done earlier in works like Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, published in 1733, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man, published in 1826, a work whose plot culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1887, and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, published in 1895, were concerned with 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 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 led to the development of a whole genre of popular science fiction as the 20th century approached.

Stream Of Consciousness

James Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922, had a major influence on modern novelists, in the way that it replaced the 18th- and 19th-century narrator with a text that attempted to record inner thoughts, or a stream of consciousness. This term was first used by William James in 1890 and, along with the related term interior monologue, is used by modernists like Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. On the extra-European usage of the technique see also Elly Hagenaar and Eide, Elisabeth, Stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse in modern Chinese literature, published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, volume 56, 1993, and P.M. Nayak, ed., The voyage inward: stream of consciousness in Indian English fiction, published by Bahri Publications in 1999. Also in the 1920s expressionist Alfred Döblin went in a different direction with Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, where interspersed non-fictional text fragments exist alongside the fictional material to create another new form of realism, which differs from that of stream-of-consciousness. Later works like Samuel Beckett's trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, published in 1951 and 1953, as well as Julio Cortázar's Rayuela, published in 1963, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973, all make use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. On the other hand, Robert Coover is an example of those authors who, in the 1960s, fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental structural concepts. The 20th century novel deals with a wide range of subject matter. Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1928, focuses on a young German's experiences of World War I. The Jazz Age is explored by American F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Great Depression by fellow American John Steinbeck. Totalitarianism is the subject of British writer George Orwell's most famous novels. Existentialism is the focus of two writers from France: Jean-Paul Sartre with Nausea, published in 1938, and Albert Camus with The Stranger, published in 1942. The counterculture of the 1960s, with its exploration of altered states of consciousness, led to revived interest in the mystical works of Hermann Hesse, such as Steppenwolf, published in 1927, and produced iconic works of its own, for example Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Novelists have also been interested in the subject of racial and gender identity in recent decades. Jesse Kavadlo of Maryville University of St. Louis has described Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, published in 1996, as a closeted feminist critique. Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek were feminist voices during this period. Furthermore, the major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries have also influenced novelists. The events of World War II, from a German perspective, are dealt with by Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, published in 1959, and an American by Joseph Heller's Catch-22, published in 1961. The subsequent Cold War influenced popular spy novels. Latin American self-awareness in the wake of the leftist revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a Latin American Boom, linked to the names of novelists Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, along with the invention of a special brand of postmodern magic realism. Another major 20th-century social event, the so-called sexual revolution is reflected in the modern novel. D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover had to be published in Italy in 1928 with British censorship only lifting its ban as late as 1960. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, published in 1934, created a comparable US scandal. Transgressive fiction from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, published in 1955, to Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires, published in 1998, pushed the boundaries, leading to the mainstream publication of explicitly erotic works such as Anne Desclos' Story of O, published in 1954, and Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus, published in 1978. In the second half of the 20th century, Postmodern authors subverted serious debate with playfulness, claiming that art could never be original, that it always plays with existing materials. The idea that language is self-referential was already an accepted truth in the world of pulp fiction. A postmodernist re-reads popular literature as an essential cultural production. Novels from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1966, to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, published in 1980, and Foucault's Pendulum, published in 1989, made use of intertextual references. Genre fiction While the reader of so-called serious literature will follow public discussions of novels, popular fiction production employs more direct and short-term marketing strategies by openly declaring a work's genre. Popular novels are based entirely on the expectations for the particular genre, and this includes the creation of a series of novels with an identifiable brand name. e.g. the Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle. Popular literature holds a larger market share. Romance fiction had an estimated 1.375 billion dollar share in the US book market in 2007. Inspirational literature/religious literature followed with 819 million dollars, science fiction/fantasy with 700 million dollars, mystery with 650 million dollars and then classic literary fiction with 466 million dollars. Genre literature might be seen as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both fields share a focus on readers who are in search of accessible reading satisfaction. The twentieth 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, published in 1719, and its immediate successors. Modern pornography has no precedent in the chapbook market but originates in libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, of works like John Cleland's Fanny Hill, published in 1749, and similar eighteenth century novels. Ian Fleming'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, published in 1707. Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon is influenced by Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature, including its nineteenth century successors. Modern horror fiction also has no precedent on the market of chapbooks but goes back to the elitist market of early nineteenth century Romantic literature. Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history, from the 1860s. The authors of popular fiction tend to advertise that they have exploited a controversial topic and this is a major difference between them and so-called elitist literature. Dan Brown, for example, discusses, on his website, the question whether his Da Vinci Code is an anti-Christian novel. And because authors of popular fiction have a fan community to serve, they can risk offending literary critics. However, the boundaries between popular and serious literature have blurred in recent years, with postmodernism and poststructuralism, as well as by adaptation of popular literary classics by the film and television industries. Crime became a major subject of 20th and 21st century genre novelists and crime fiction reflects the realities of modern industrialized societies. Crime is both a personal and public subject: criminals each have their personal motivations; detectives, see their moral codes challenged. Patricia Highsmith's thrillers became a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, published in 1985 and 1986, is an example of experimental postmodernist literature based on this genre. Fantasy is another major area of commercial fiction, and a major example is J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954 and 1955, a work originally written for young readers that became a major cultural artefact. Tolkien in fact revived the tradition of European epic literature in the tradition of Beowulf, the North Germanic Edda and the Arthurian Cycles. Science fiction is another important type of genre fiction and has developed in a variety of ways, ranging from the early, technological adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable in the 1860s, to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, about Western consumerism and technology. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, deals with totalitarianism and surveillance, among other matters, while Stanisław Lem, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke produced modern classics which focus on the interaction between humans and machines. The surreal novels of Philip K Dick such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explore the nature of reality, reflecting the widespread recreational experimentation with drugs and cold-war paranoia of the 60's and 70's. Writers such as Ursula le Guin and Margaret Atwood explore feminist and broader social issues in their works. William Gibson, author of, continues to push the boundaries of the genre.