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Novel

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   A novel (from French nouvelle Italian "novella", "new") 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 and a specific 'literary' style—or
   specific literary styles.

Nomenclature

   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 (originally a short
       piece of fiction) rivaling the romance (the epic-length
       performance). 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 (Spanish: novela) 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 (and Spanish) 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 (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and so forth).

History

Ancient world

   Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; title page of 1719 newspaper edition
   Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; title page of 1719 newspaper edition

   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 Sumerian Epic of
   Gilgamesh, and in Indian epics such as the Ramayana and 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
   (with Petronius' Satyricon, the incredible stories of Lucian of
   Samosata, and Lucius Apuleius' proto- picaresque The Golden Ass) and a
   heroic strain (with the romances of Heliodorus and Longus). 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.

Romance, 1000-1500

   The word romance seems to have become the label of romantic fictions
   because of the "Romance" language in which early (11th and twelfth
   century) 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. Classics of
   the romance developed such as the Roman de la Rose, 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.

Early novel, 1000-1600

   The Pilgrims diverting each others with tales; woodcut from Caxton's
   1486 edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
   The Pilgrims diverting each others with tales; woodcut from Caxton's
   1486 edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

   It is difficult to give a full catalog of the genres that finally
   culminated — with the The Tale of Genji in the 11th century, followed
   by 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 (or competitors among the storytellers).
   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 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
   (created by the actual author) 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.

Conflict between novels and romances, 1600-1700

   The cheap design of chapbooks: The Honour of Chivalry, first published
   in 1598; title page of an early eighteenth century edition
   Enlarge
   The cheap design of chapbooks: The Honour of Chivalry, first published
   in 1598; title page of an early eighteenth century edition
   William Painter's Palace of Pleasure well furnished with plesaunt
   Hitorires and excellent Nouvelles (1566), "novels" in the original
   sense of the word.
   Enlarge
   William Painter's Palace of Pleasure well furnished with plesaunt
   Hitorires and excellent Nouvelles (1566), "novels" in the original
   sense of the word.
   Miguel de Cervantes' Novelas Exemplares (1613)
   Enlarge
   Miguel de Cervantes' Novelas Exemplares (1613)
   The [...], or [...] formula promising an example; here, William
   Congreve's Incognita (1692) promising a reconciliation of love and duty
   Enlarge
   The [...], or [...] formula promising an example; here, William
   Congreve's Incognita (1692) promising a reconciliation of love and duty

   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 (1613) to the two volumes of his
   Don Quixote (1605/15). 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 (1607-27) 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 (literally
   "novel with a key") — one that, properly understood, alludes to
   characters in the real world. John Barclay's Argenis (1625-26) 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 (himself a hero in the
   romances of Madeleine de Scudéry) published the first volume of his
   Roman Comique in 1651 (successive volumes appeared in 1657 and, by
   another hand, in 1663) with a plea for the development Cervantes had
   introduced in Spain. France should (as he wrote in the famous twenty
   first chapter of the Roman Comique ) 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 (published in 1670 together
   with Pierre Daniel Huet's famous Treatise on the Origin of Romances),
   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 behaviour. 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 (where censorship was liberal) 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. (The audience
   played its own game in identifying who was who). 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".

Market around 1700

   Early eighteenth century novels and romances were still not considered
   part of the world of learning, hence not 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:
   image positioning

   3.1
   Heroical Romances:
   Fénelon's Telemach (1699)
   1
   Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of public affairs:
   Manley's New Atalantis (1709) 2
   Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of private affairs:
   Menantes' Satyrischer Roman (1706) 3.2
   Classics of the novel from the Arabian Nights to M. de La Fayette's
   Princesse de Clèves (1678) 4
   Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention:
   Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) 5
   Sold as true public history, risking to be read as romantic invention:
   La Guerre d'Espagne (1707)
   3.3
   Satirical Romances:
   Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) from Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa
   (Amsterdam, 2001), 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 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 (he thinks) is
     to be found extant; the Life of one Man being scarce capable of a
     greater Variety.
          The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a
     religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always
     ap[p]ly them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example,
     and to justify and honour 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 (1644-1712) 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 (1707), 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.

"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 (1715)
   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 (1699/1700).

   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, 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.
   The title pages of both the English edition of Fénelon's Telemachus
   (London: E. Curll, 1715) and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (London: W.
   Taylor, 1719): neither of them offer "Novels" as Aphra Behn and William
   Congreve had done.
   The title pages of both the English edition of Fénelon's Telemachus
   (London: E. Curll, 1715) and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (London: W.
   Taylor, 1719): neither of them offer "Novels" as Aphra Behn and William
   Congreve had done.

   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 (though readers of taste would read, of
   course, all his proclamations about being a real man as made in good
   humour). 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 (and if not, still readable as good allegory) — this is the
   complex game which puts this work into the fourth column of the pattern
   above.

Reformation, 1700-1800

   Classics of the novel from the sixteenth century onwards: title page of
   A Select Collection of Novels (1720-22)
   Enlarge
   Classics of the novel from the sixteenth century onwards: title page of
   A Select Collection of Novels (1720-22)

   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 (first published in Europe from 1704 to
   1715 in French, and translated immediately from this edition into
   English and German).

Novels as literature, 1740-1800

   Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741), published with clear intentions:
   "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..."
   Enlarge
   Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741), published with clear intentions:
   "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..."

   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 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 (whilst the rest
   of the market would thus continue but lose most of its public appeal).
   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 (they opened an internal
   discourse about the history of literature), 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 (1740) 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
   (1771). 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 (1774) 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.

19th century

   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
   (1794). 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 (literally,
   "awe-inspiring") 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 (1803) 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
   (1811), 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.

   1. The novel as a literary production, promoted by critical discourse

   Spanish Literature French Literature German Literature English
   Literature …by language and nation
       _______________________________________________________________

   2. Popular Fiction, not promoted by criticism

   1
   The modern roman à clef (a recent example is Primary Colors) 2
   Sex, including soft "romantic" pornography for the female audience 3
   Historical settings (the tradition of heroic romances), crime (the
   tradition of the seventeenth century novel) 4
   Adventure, science fiction 5
   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. The novel proved to be a medium for a
   communication both intimate (novels can be read privately whereas plays
   are always a public event) and public (novels are published and thus
   become a matter touching the public, if not the nation, and its vital
   interests), 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.

20th century

          See Modernist literature and Postmodern literature

Important novels

Western precursors

   These are the earliest extant Western precursors to the novel:
     * Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus ( Greek, 4th century BC), a
       largely fictional account of the education of Emperor Cyrus the
       Great of Persia; considered a precursor to the novel
     * Petronius, Satyricon (Latin, 1st century AD)
     * Apuleius, The Golden Ass (Latin, 2nd century)
     * Chariton, The Loves of Chaereas and Callirhoe ( Greek, 1st–2nd
       century)
     * Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon ( Greek, 2nd century)
     * Longus, Daphnis and Chloe ( Greek, 2nd century)
     * Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesian Tale ( Greek, 2nd–3rd century)
     * Heliodorus, Ethiopian Tale ( Greek, 3rd–4th century)
     * Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca ( Greek, 3rd–4th century)
     * Joseph and Aseneth ( Greek, 1st–5th century)
     * The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre (Latin adaptation of lost
       Greek original, 5th–6th century)

Asian precursors

   Early important Asian precursors to the novel include:
     * Vishnu Sarma, Panchatantra (Sanskrit, 3rd century BC)
     * Vikram and the Vampire (Sanskrit, 1st century BC)
     * Hitopadesha (Sanskrit, 1st–2nd century AD)
     * Sri Dandin, The Adventures of the Ten Princes (Sanskrit, 6th–7th
       century)
     * Banabhatta, Kadambari (Sanskrit, 7th century)
     * Ferdowsi, Shahnameh ( Persian, 10th century)
     * The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter ( Japanese, 10th century)

11th century

     * Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji ( Japanese, 11th century),
       arguably the first true novel, in the sense of a continued
       fictional narrative written by one author

13th century

     * Ramon Llull, Blanquerna ( Catalan, 1283)

14th century

     * Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Chinese, 1330)
     * Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron ( Italian, 1353)
     * Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (English, 1386- 1400)

15th century

     * Antoine de la Sale, Petit Jehan de Saintré (French, 1456)
     * Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur (English, 1485)
     * Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc ( Catalan, 1490), a chivalric
       romance
     * Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong, Water Margin (Chinese, 15th century)

16th century

     * Jacopo Sannazaro, La Arcadia ( Italian, 1504), a pastoral novel
     * Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadis de Gaula (Spanish adaptation of
       lost 13th century original, 1508)
     * Thomas More, Utopia (Latin, 1516)
     * François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (French, 1532)
     * Jorge de Montemayor, La Diana (Spanish, 1559), a pastoral novel
     * Lazarillo de Tormes (Spanish, 1554)
     * Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West (Chinese, 1590)
     * Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache (Spanish, 1599)

17th century

     * Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (Spanish, 1605)
     * Honoré d'Urfé, Astrée (French, 1607)
     * Francisco de Quevedo, El Buscón (Spanish, 1626), the masterpiece of
       the picaresque sub-genre
     * Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus (German,
       1668– 1669), the Thirty Years' War put into satirical autobiography
     * Madame de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves (French, 1678)
     * Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1684)
       (English, 1684– 1687), the first full-blown epistolary novel
     * Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (English, 1688)
     * Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber (Chinese, 18th century)

18th century

     * Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (English, 1719)
     * Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (English, 1719)
     * Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (Irish, 1726, amended 1735)
     * Antoine François Prévost, Manon Lescaut (French, 1732)
     * Samuel Richardson, Pamela (English, 1740)
     * Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (English, 1749)
     * John Cleland, Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (English,
       1749)
     * Voltaire, Candide (French, 1759)
     * Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Irish, 1759– 1767)
     * Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Scottish, 1771)
     * Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Nicholas Experience (the first
       Polish novel, 1776)
     * Frances Burney, Evelina (English, 1778)
     * Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (French, 1782)
     * Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (English, 1794)

Genre novels

   From the late Victorian period to the present, several types of "genre"
   novels and romances have been popular. While often slighted by critics
   and academics, these have been as popular as the more critically and
   academically acclaimed novels; in recent times, the best of them have
   been recognized as serious literature. Some categories of genre fiction
   are:
     * Science fiction
     * Fantasy
     * Crime fiction
     * Westerns
     * Romance novels
     * Spy novels and thrillers

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