NOVEL.

ROLCAM · Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2007 6:56 am Post subject: NOVEL.

Novel is a long fictional story written in prose. It is one of the most popular forms of literature.

The subject matter of novels covers the whole range of human experience and imagination. Some novels portray true-to-life characters and events. Writers of such realistic novels try to represent life as it is. In contrast to realistic novels, romantic novels portray idealized versions of life. Some novels explore purely imaginary worlds. For example, science-fiction novels may describe events that take place in the future or on other planets. Other popular kinds of novels include detective novels and mysteries, whose suspenseful plots fascinate countless readers.

As a literary form, the novel has four basic features that together distinguish it from other kinds of literature. First, a novel is a narrative--that is, a story presented by a teller. It thus differs from a drama, which presents a story through the speech and actions of characters on a stage.

Second, novels are longer than short stories, fairy tales, and most other types of narratives. Novels vary greatly in length, but most exceed 60,000 words. Because of their length, novels can cover a longer period and include more characters than can most other kinds of narratives.

Third, a novel is written in prose rather than verse. This feature distinguishes novels from long narrative poems.

Fourth, novels are works of fiction. They differ from histories, biographies, and other long prose narratives that tell about real events and people. Novelists sometimes base their stories on actual events or the lives of real people. But these authors also make up incidents and characters. Therefore, all novels are partly, if not entirely, imaginary.

The basic features of the novel make it a uniquely flexible form of literature. Novelists can arrange incidents, describe places, and represent characters in an almost limitless variety of ways. They also may narrate their stories from different points of view. In some novels, for example, one of the characters may tell the story. In others, the events may be described from the viewpoint of a person outside of the story. Some novelists change the point of view from one section of a story to another. Novelists also vary their treatment of time. They may devote hundreds of pages to the description of the events of a single day, or they may cover many years within a few paragraphs.

Origins of the novel

This article discusses the development of the novel in Western literature. The history of the novel is marked by an almost continual development of variations on old narrative forms. No matter how up to date or localized novels may seem, their stories still employ many themes and issues from narrative forms dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Ancient Greek and Roman narratives. In ancient times, most long narratives were composed in verse. Histories were among the few kinds of long narratives written in prose. The earliest known histories were written by two Greek authors, Herodotus and Thucydides, during the 400's B.C.

The finest fictional narratives of ancient Greece were long poems called epics, which told about the deeds of legendary heroes and mythical gods. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the two most famous epics, were probably composed by Homer between 800 and 700 B.C.

The Greeks also wrote long fictional adventure stories. These tales described fantastic adventures in foreign countries or related the plights of young lovers. Some writers composed pastoral tales, which told of love between shepherds and maidens. One of the best-known Greek pastorals is Daphnis and Chloe (A.D. 100's or 200's) by Longus.

The most important Roman narratives in prose included Satyricon (about 60 A.D.) by Petronius and Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass (mid-100's A.D.), by Lucius Apuleius. These earthy stories contrast sharply with the love stories of the Greeks. Satyricon vividly portrays the adventures of three Roman scamps. Metamorphoses tells of a man who is changed into a donkey and travels through various countries observing the weaknesses and failings of humans.

Medieval narratives. The word novel originally referred to prose stories that were topical. The word for novel in French and other languages deriving from classical Latin is roman. The word reflects the fictions called romances in which it had its roots. Love and adventure stories called romances of chivalry became widely popular during the late Middle Ages. Many of the romances dealt with the legendary British King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Early novels. During the 1500's and 1600's, many English romances were written in an extremely decorative style. After John Lyly of England wrote Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), this highly artificial style was called euphuistic and was widely imitated. In France, many romances and romance histories were written by important women writers. Madeleine de Scudery wrote historical narratives, such as Artamene, or The Great Cyrus (1649-1653). Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette wrote the most psychologically powerful of these novels, The Princess of Cleves (1678).

In Spain, several narratives that were more realistic appeared during the 1500's. One of the most influential was Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), by an unknown Spanish author. Some critics consider it the first picaresque novel. These novels describe the adventures of a young picaro (rogue) who makes his way in the world through cunning and treachery. Picaresque novels are episodic like romances about knights, but in Lazarillo de Tormes, the rogue replaces the knight as the hero.

The first classic novel, according to some critics, was the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote (part I 1605, part II 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes's story combines the chivalric romance and the picaresque adventure. The central character in Don Quixote is a middle-aged country landowner who imagines himself a knight in armor, battling injustice. He differs significantly from the unbelievably heroic or clever characters in romances and picaresque narratives. Cervantes's characters resemble real people and often make foolish and costly mistakes.

The rise of the English novel

The novel form tends to emphasize realistic social themes. Sophisticated novels of this kind first appeared in England in the early 1700's. At that time, the urge to record the details of ordinary life began to replace the older narrative focus on wondrous, supernatural, remote, and heroic material.

The first English novelist. Some critics regard Daniel Defoe as the first novelist, though others credit Aphra Behn with combining the novel form and the romance in her fascinating slave narrative, Oroonoko (1688). Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) consist of a series of episodes in the lives of clever and resourceful, but ordinary, characters.

Samuel Richardson wrote novels with well-developed plots rather than a sequence of episodes. His Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) tells of a virtuous female servant who resists her master's attempts to seduce her. The story is told in the form of letters, most of which are written by Pamela, the heroine, to her family. Through the letters, the reader follows Pamela's thoughts and feelings. Richardson thus reveals key psychological aspects of the central character.

Henry Fielding wrote The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), which is especially noted for its elaborate, unified plot. This novel tells of the comical adventures of a young orphan, first as he grows up in rural England, and then as he travels toward London, meeting a variety of characters in English life.

Tobias Smollett wrote amusing, loosely constructed novels about eccentric characters. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) is a novel in letter form about a variety of English travelers and personality types.

Laurence Sterne was one of the greatest experimenters in the history of the novel. His masterpiece is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767). Tristram Shandy is an unconventional novel about an unconventional family. The story humorously portrays character types, philosophical ideas, and social customs.

Gothic novels became widely popular in England during the late 1700's through the 1800's. These horror stories tell of mysterious events that take place in gloomy, isolated castles. They have suspenseful, action-packed plots. The best-known Gothic novels include The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe and The Monk (1796) by Matthew "Monk" Lewis. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), about a scientist who creates a monster from parts of dead bodies, and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), about a nobleman who is secretly a vampire, became the most enduring examples of the type.

The 1800's

During the 1800's, English writers elaborated on the techniques of the early novelists and produced many great works. Authors in France, the United States, and Russia also wrote novels of major literary importance. The romantic movement, which stressed the need for full expression of human emotions and imagination, dominated the literature of the early 1800's. It was followed by the realistic movement, which demanded that literature accurately represent life as it is.

Britain. Sir Walter Scott, a Scottish romantic writer, created and popularized historical novels. Such novels re-create the atmosphere of a past period and include actual characters and events from history. Scott wrote a long series of historical novels, including Waverley (1814), about a Scottish rebellion against England, and Rob Roy (1817), about a Scottish outlaw.

The novel of manners appeared in England during the late 1700's. Fanny Burney was one of the first writers in the tradition with Evelina (1778), a novel about a young woman's introduction to London life. Jane Austen perfected the novel of manners in the early 1800's. Her masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice (1813), centers on the social conventions surrounding courtship and marriage.

The English novel flourished during the 1800's, expanding to explore society's classes and institutions. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) added both Gothic and romance elements to the novel of manners. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) merged Gothic romance and fictional biography. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote satirically on the hypocrisies of life in London and Paris in Vanity Fair (1847-1848). Charles Dickens wrote many great novels about English urban life. For example, Oliver Twist (1837-1839) deals with the London underworld.

Anthony Trollope wrote long, detailed novels centering on politics, society, and religion as in the witty Barchester Towers (1857). George Eliot portrayed English rural and small-town life. Her greatest work, Middlemarch (1871-1872), deals with the profound moral crises in the lives of landowners and rural professionals. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island (1883) and other popular adventure novels. In the late 1800's, Thomas Hardy wrote novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895), in which tortured characters were fated to lead desperate lives.

France. French writers greatly influenced the development of the novel in the 1800's. Honore de Balzac wrote a series of novels in the 1830's and 1840's under the collective title The Human Comedy. These were the first novels to fully explore the manners and morals of an entire society. Stendhal contributed to the development of the psychological novel in The Red and the Black (1830) and to the political novel in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). Alexandre Dumas pere and Victor Hugo wrote massive historical novels. The most famous include Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1845) and Hugo's Les Miserables (1862).

Gustave Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary (1856), which tells about a woman unhappy in her marriage to a village doctor. Flaubert's precise objective style influenced many other writers.

Emile Zola helped establish naturalism as an important literary movement in the late 1800's. According to the theory of naturalism, a person's life is determined by heredity and environment. Naturalistic novels portray people who are trapped by circumstances beyond their control. Many of these novels deal with grim subjects. Zola's Germinal (1885), for example, describes the suffering of French miners.

The United States. The early American novel was less concerned with social and historical tradition than the European novel. From its beginnings, the American novel explored intense family themes, as in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), about a man who goes insane and murders his wife and children. American novels also dealt with the frontier landscape, as in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Cooper's novel includes one of America's great folk heroes, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo.

The mid-1800's produced classic American novels of moral dilemmas and obsession. Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of sin, The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Herman Melville's symbolic whaling story, Moby-Dick (1851), are examples. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-1852) was one of the first novels to raise the nation's consciousness about slavery.

In the late 1800's, Mark Twain captured American humor and colloquial speech in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The later book in particular has been praised for its attack on the social evils of the day and its vivid and realistic portrait of life on the Mississippi River.

William Dean Howells, in his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), became the first American writer to draw on the tradition of social realism coming out of European fiction in the 1800's. The novel describes the economic ruin but moral salvation of a Boston businessman. Henry James was the master of the art of the sophisticated novel in America. He has been acclaimed for his psychological portrayals of sensitive, intelligent characters. James spent much time in England and followed the English tradition of writing about social manners in The Portrait of a Lady (1880-1881) and other novels.

During the late 1800's and early 1900's, the French naturalist movement influenced many American writers, notably Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. Crane's first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), portrays the cruelty and vulgarity of slum life. Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) tells of a poor, lonely woman in Chicago. Norris's The Octopus (1901) depicts the expansion of the American railroad. Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) attacked the Chicago-based meat-packing industry so effectively that the novel led directly to government reforms.

Russia produced its two greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, during the 1800's. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky rank as supreme masters of the realistic novel.

Tolstoy's famous masterpiece, War and Peace (1869), centers on the 1812 invasion of Russia by the French emperor Napoleon I. The account of the war is interwoven with stories about the lives of several Russian families. Dostoevsky won fame for his probing psychological insight and his treatment of philosophical ideas. In his novel Crime and Punishment (1866), Dostoevsky explored the anguished mind of a young student who commits two murders.

The modern novel

Authors from almost every country wrote great novels during the 1900's. Novelists experimented with various styles, techniques, and types of plots. World War I (1914-1918) had a major impact on many writers. The noble ideals and high hopes with which nations entered the war were shattered by the length and destruction of the conflict. After the war, many novelists dealt with the social changes and personal disillusionments of modern times. After World War II (1939-1945), novelists continued to explore the problems of modern life, especially the threat of nuclear war.

New directions in the novel. Older forms of the novel persisted in the early 1900's, notably in the works of Arnold Bennett and Rudyard Kipling in England. However, more experimental novelists began to gain prominence. In such novels as Nostromo (1904), the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad changed the form of the adventure story. Conrad's stylistic experiments and probing psychological analysis helped shape the future of the novel in the 1900's.

In England, D. H. Lawrence broke many social taboos in writing about sexual passion in such novels as Women in Love (1920). Ford Madox Ford experimented with narration in The Good Soldier (1915), in which the narrator discovers that his wife and his best friend have been lovers for years. E. M. Forster raised issues of class and race in A Passage to India (1924).

Marcel Proust of France wrote the masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927). This seven-part novel deals with many subjects and portrays French society in the process of change during the early 1900's. Proust used such experimental techniques as poetic daydreams and passages of elaborate dialogue to tell his story. The hero of French author Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night (1932) wanders aimlessly through war-torn Europe.

The Irish writer James Joyce became one of the greatest novelists of the 1900's. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a largely autobiographical novel about his youth, Joyce began to use techniques of narration in which the author presents the thoughts, sensations, and memories that flow through a character's mind. He perfected this technique, called interior narration, or stream of consciousness, in Ulysses (1922). This challenging novel compares one day in the life of a 1904 Dublin resident with events in Homer's Odyssey.

The English author Virginia Woolf also experimented with interior narration. Her best novels, such as To the Lighthouse (1927), are known for their brilliant structure and the emotional power of their style.

The greatest American novelists of the early 1900's included Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. Wharton followed Henry James in such novels of manners as The Age of Innocence (1920), about aristocratic New Yorkers of the 1870's. Lewis wrote about middle-class Americans in Babbitt (1922). In The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald pictured the false glamour and moral emptiness of wealthy, pleasure-seeking Americans of the 1920's, an era called the Jazz Age. Hemingway captured the personal letdown and sense of loss that many people felt after World War I in The Sun Also Rises (1926). In The Sound and the Fury (1929) and other novels, Faulkner dealt with the decline of Southern aristocratic families and the breakdown of traditional standards of behavior. Steinbeck wrote about the Great Depression in such powerful novels as The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

The American detective novel made a significant contribution to the modern novel with its realistic language and cynicism. The most important of these novels included The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett and The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler.

Franz Kafka, a Czech author who wrote in German, produced puzzling novels that have an atmosphere of fantasy and nightmare. In The Trial (1925), Kafka portrayed the frustration and despair of an ordinary man entangled in the workings of a bureaucratic legal system. The German novelist Thomas Mann also wrote about the frustrations of modern life, but the main characters in his novels are sensitive and intellectually gifted. Mann's major novels include The Magic Mountain (1924).

Existentialism, a philosophic movement, greatly influenced French literature during the late 1930's and the 1940's. Existentialists emphasized that individuals must choose their own way to live and act in an essentially meaningless world and then accept full responsibility for their actions. The rise of existentialism in France resulted in a number of existential novels, including Nausea (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre and The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus. Sartre and Camus focused on moral issues rather than on experimental techniques.

After World War II. During the 1950's, an experimental form called the nouveau roman (new novel) appeared in France. The nouveau roman writers rejected traditional features of novels, such as organized plots and clear-cut types of characters. Instead, they wrote novels that focused on exact descriptions of objects and events. The nouveau roman writers included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Michel Butor. Jealousy (1957) by Robbe-Grillet typifies the nouveau roman.

Perhaps the most original novelist of the 1940's and 1950's was Samuel Beckett, an Irish-born author who wrote in both French and English. Beckett was influenced by James Joyce and used the interior narration technique in Malone Dies (1951). This novel centers on the repressed hysteria of a dying tramp named Malone.

In England, the leading postwar novelists included Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Graham Greene, and William Golding. Waugh wrote light satirical novels before the war, but his tone later deepened in Brideshead Revisited (1945), a study of an aristocratic Roman Catholic family. Orwell's 1984 (1949) deals with life in a totalitarian state. Greene wrote about religious and moral problems in The Heart of the Matter (1948). Golding also explored moral issues in Lord of the Flies (1954), which tells of a group of boys who are stranded on an island and begin to act like savages. Other postwar English novelists included Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, C. P. Snow, and Muriel Spark.

American writers produced fairly conventional novels during the 1950's. One of the most popular novels of this period was The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger. It tells about the problems of a prep school dropout in New York City. The novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud deal partly with Jewish life in the United States. Bellow followed the form of the picaresque narrative in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), about a Chicago youth who grows up during the Great Depression. In The Assistant (1957), Malamud portrayed the relationship between a poor Jewish shopkeeper and his helper. In Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Roth wrote of the strained love affair between a young middle-class Jewish man and a wealthy Jewish girl.

The American novelists Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin focused on the difficulties faced by African Americans. Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) describes a young black man's growing awareness of the turmoil over race in the United States. Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) tells of a poor black family in the Harlem section of New York City.

Other brilliant writers in the 1950's produced well-crafted and powerful novels. Flannery O'Connor explored religious fanaticism in the South in Wise Blood (1952). The Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita (1955), a funny and controversial novel about an older man's obsession with a young girl.

The black humor style in fiction became popular during the 1960's. Black humorists treat serious subjects in a darkly comic manner. Their novels are both funny and tragic. For example, Catch-22 (1961), by the American author Joseph Heller, deals humorously with the absurdities of warfare and military organizations, but also captures the terrifying confusion of war.

The novel today features international trends that appeared during the 1960's and 1970's. One of the trends was introduced by a group of authors who wrote nonfiction novels. These novelists combined a documentary style with fictional techniques to tell about actual events and people.

The American writer Truman Capote originated the term "nonfiction novel" to describe his In Cold Blood (1966). Capote based this work on an actual 1959 murder case in which two men killed a Kansas farm family. He used documented facts about the case and wrote in a style typical of newspaper writing. Many other American authors, including William Styron and Norman Mailer, followed Capote in writing nonfiction novels. In The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Styron told the story of an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia led by Nat Turner, a black preacher. Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night (1968), which describes his experiences in a 1967 protest march in Washington, D.C.

One group of writers created highly imaginative and inventive novels. In some cases, they modernized myths, fairy tales, and other old stories, or they created fantasy worlds. Latin American fiction gained recognition with a kind of novel called magic realism, which blends dreams and magic with everyday reality. The originator of this style was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote a classic of magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), about generations of a strange Latin American family. Manuel Puig of Argentina wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), about the relationship between two men who share a prison cell.

Postwar German novelists produced their own style of magic realism in the fiction of Gunter Grass. In Grass's The Tin Drum (1959), the main character can stop time and drown out history.

American authors who wrote similarly original and inventive stories included John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. In Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Barth pictured life at an ultramodern, computerized university. In Vonnegut's best seller Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the central character moves backward and forward in time as he struggles to make sense of his life, particularly his experience during World War II. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) deals with Germany's use of the V-2 guided missile during that war. Other authors who wrote highly original novels during the 1960's and early 1970's included Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gass, Thomas McGuane, and Ishmael Reed.

Another international trend in the novel is fiction that reflects the breakup of colonial empires in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Leaders in this trend include Nadine Gordimer of South Africa, Salman Rushdie of India, and V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad.

In the late 1900's, a number of African American women writers produced important novels that explored aspects of the modern black experience in the United States. These writers include Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker.
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Roland Camilleri

Moderator

Sydney , Australia.