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novel

Extended fictional prose narrative, usually between 30,000 and 100,000 words in length, that deals imaginatively with human experience through the psychological development of the central characters and their relationship with a broader world. The modern novel took its name and inspiration from the Italian novella, the short tale of varied character which became popular in the late 13th century. As the main form of narrative fiction in the 20th century, the novel is frequently classified according to genres and subgenres such as the historical novel, detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction.

Origins

The European novel is said to have originated in Greece in the 2nd century BC. Ancient Greek examples include the Daphnis and Chloë of Longus; almost the only surviving Latin work that could be called a novel is the Golden Ass of Apuleius (late 2nd century), based on a Greek model. There is a similar, but (until the 19th century) independent, tradition of prose narrative including psychological development in the Far East, notably in Japan, with, for example, the 11th-century Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.

Development

A major period of the novel's development came during the late Italian Renaissance, when the stimulus of foreign travel, increased wealth, and changing social patterns produced a greater interest in the events of everyday life, as opposed to religious teaching, legends of the past, or fictional fantasy. The works of the Italian writers Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello were translated into English in such collections as William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566–67). These inspired the Elizabethan English novelists, including John Lyly, Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Lodge.

Although the 17th century was dominated by the French romances of Gauthier de Costes de la Calprenède (1614–1663) and Madelaine de Scudéry, in Spain, Cervantes' Don Quixote (1604) contributed to the development of the novel through its translation into other European languages, and Grimmelshausen, whose Simplicissimus series (1669–72) was one of the earliest examples of the German novel, provided a satirical social commentary on the Thirty Years War. The English novel continued its development through the works of William Congreve and Aphra Behn. With the growth of literacy and cheaper book production, the novel rapidly developed from the 18th century to become, in the 20th century, the major literary form.

16th- and 17th-century romances During the 16th and 17th centuries four kinds of prose fiction became popular: comic romance, political romance, pastoral romance, and heroic romance.

Comic romance substantially began with the French writer François Rabelais's burlesque romances in the 1530s. The comic romance Vita di Bertoldo (1618), by the Italian Giulio Cesare Croce was, for 200 years, as popular in Italy as were Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719) or Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan, 1678) in England. In the next century French comic romances included Paul Scarron's Roman comique (1651–57), and Furétière's Roman bourgeois (1666).

Probably the earliest political romance, though more a book of philosophy than a work of fiction, was Thomas More's Utopia (1516; first translated from original Latin into English in 1551).

The first major pastoral romance was Arcadia (1501), by Italian Jacopo Sannazaro. This was followed by Spanish writer Jorge de Montemayor's Diana (1559), from which English playwright William Shakespeare took the plot of Two Gentlemen of Verona (1623), as well as some incidents in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600). Probably the most significant English pastoral romance was Arcadia (1590), by Philip Sidney, which was heavily influenced by the conventions of classical pastoral poetry.

Heroic romances, dominated by French writers, included Marin le Roy de Gomberville's Pinexandre (1632), La Calprenède's Cassandre (1644–50), and Madelaine de Scudéry's Artamène ou le grand Cyrus (1648–53).

18th century During the 18th century, the novel became firmly established as a literary form, largely because it appealed to a middle class with increasing leisure time. The works of this period reflect a preoccupation with the events of the time, and include carefully designed prose to carry both scientific, political, and religious theories, as well as biography, history, and journalism, but little fiction; most of the writers of fiction for the next 70 years combined abilities from other fields.

Exploring the novel form Daniel Defoe was an inspired writer of prose fiction, and although his novels, which include Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), show many signs of the highest art and organization, they blur journalism with fiction, relating sequences of events with little development of the characters. Most critics acknowledge the true birth of the English novel with the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), which opened the way to the full exploration of the novel's potential. English novels of this time tended to adhere to a moral formula of virtue rewarded and social standards upheld. By the close of the 18th century most of the possibilities inherent in the novel had been mapped out; from Tobias Smollett's novels of successive events to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760–67), in which virtually all the potentials of the novel form are explored, mocked, achieved, discussed, and demonstrated. Another notable achievement was the Vicar of Wakefield (1766), by Oliver Goldsmith.

The modern romantic school The publication in 1765 of Thomas Percy's Reliques reawakened an interest in the age of chivalry and romance. The first of the modern romantic school was Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto was published in 1769. The greatest genius in this form, which came to be called the gothic novel, was undoubtedly Ann Radcliffe, whose Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and other works were often imitated, and had a profound influence on the taste of generations of readers, who looked for fiction which combined art with the fantastic, the grotesque, and the mysterious, and made a strong appeal to the emotions.

19th century The novel gradually evolved during the 19th century from simple representation to the use of imagery, symbolic themes, and different authorial stances. In the early 19th century Walter Scott developed the historical novel, and Jane Austen wrote perceptive ‘novels of manners’. English fiction had an immediate impact throughout Europe and beyond. Given such impetus, the Victorian novel in England rapidly became institutionalized. Celebrated British novelists of the Victorian age were Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

The US novel The 19th century was also a great period for the novel in the USA, with the birth of a distinctively American, as opposed to British, linguistic tradition. James Fenimore Cooper wrote abundantly about the expanding American nation, Nathaniel Hawthorne produced fiction rich in symbolism which allegorized contemporary attitudes and behaviour, Herman Melville wrote the archetypal early American novel Moby Dick (1851), and Mark Twain introduced linguistic forms from the South to his novels Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884). Before World War II, Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner established themselves as prominent novelists, each with a very individual style. More than ever, the novel had become a vehicle for social commentary and criticism. After the war a new generation of US novelists reached maturity, with many of them crossing into poetry and short stories as well. This group included Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Porter, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, J D Salinger, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Updike.

Realism The work of English Victorian writers Dickens and George Gissing showed the beginnings of the realist style, taking lower-class life for its theme. The influence of the German poet, novelist, and dramatist Johann Goethe and German romance was shown in France in the idealistic novels of the French new woman writer George Sand. Then, with a greater mixture of realism, came the novels of the French writer Honoré de Balzac; other members of the ‘realist’ school were the French novelists Stendhal and Prosper Mérimée. The second half of the century was dominated by French writer Gustave Flaubert, who succeeded in fusing the romantic and the realistic.

Naturalism Influenced by Flaubert are such English writers as George Moore, while others who reveal more or less directly the influence of the French naturalistic movement are Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. The naturalist novel was further developed by the French writers the Goncourt brothers and Alphonse Daudet, although naturalism was not formulated into a theory of art until French novelist Emile Zola did so. He and Guy de Maupassant were responsible for the spread of naturalism throughout Europe, evidenced in the works of the Swedish writer August Strindberg , in the German social novels of Friedrich Spielhagen, Theodor Fontane, Otto Ludwig, the Swiss Jeremias Gotthelf and Gottfried Keller, and in the Spanish realist José Maria de Pereda, followed by Armando Valdes. In England the influence of the French naturalists was seen especially in the works of Arnold Bennett, but the English social novel tended towards sociological study – as in the work of H G Wells and John Galsworthy. The English novel is traditionally loose in structure, and in this respect has more in common with the Russian novel than with the French.

The Russian novel The first part of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace appeared in 1862 and the work was completed seven years later. Realism, which in Western Europe was a moral revolt against the excesses of Romanticism, was, in Russia, a natural growth free from theorizing. The contribution of the Russian novelists, epitomized in Tolstoy, is the shift of emphasis from the physiological to the psychological. Though Tolstoy was Russia's greatest novelist, it was Ivan Turgenev who influenced European literature most, since he combined Russian concentration on the psychology of his characters with French artistry and compactness of form.

The German novel In Germany, before the Nazi regime, there was a literature of revolt, which included the novels of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Theodore Plivier, and Ludwig Renn, most of it then unknown in England. The novels of Heinrich Mann portray Germany in all its prosperity in the decades preceding World War I. The aftermath of the war brought novels of disillusionment; others took war as their theme. Major novels stressing human loneliness and nightmare, and using to the full the bleak techniques of the short novel, were written by Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse.

The World English novel From the 18th century, the novel has found success in all parts of the English-speaking world. For example, early Australian novels include Marcus Clarke's account of the convict settlements in For the Term of his Natural Life (1874), Thomas Haliburton and John Richardson pioneered the novel in Canada, and Olive Schreiner used the form as feminist comment in South Africa. V S Naipaul and Eustace Braithwaite are West Indian novelists writing about life in both the Caribbean and England. The Nigerian Chinua Achebe has written of the conflict of cultures and traditions in his homeland in Things Fall Apart (1958).

20th century Although the popularity of the novel had hitherto perhaps been due to its ability to remain more faithful to everyday reality than other literary forms, the 20th-century European novel is distinguished by variety and experiment. This was pioneered by a number of writers, many of which were ardent theorists of the novel as well as practitioners, and it was under their influence that the novel made its second great development. The principal influence was French, and the high level of art to which the French novel had aspired in the second half of the 19th century. Radically new methods of handling time, space, consciousness, relationship, story, and even words themselves, were tried. There was both an adherence to and a revolt against French naturalism. It was felt that there was a problem with representing life in literature (the aim of realist or naturalist novels), in that it is impossible to be fully realistic through prose.

This reaction to ultra-realism resulted in the French writer Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu/Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), which in turn influenced the narrative method of the English writer Virginia Woolf. Woolf employed a technique which has been described as a stream of consciousness to make an intimate exploration of her characters' thought and motivation, exemplified particularly in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931). James Joyce, noted for his experimental use of language, also focused on his characters' psychological condition in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Not all 20th-century novelists experimented in these ways with space, time, and consciousness; E M Forster, for example, was concerned with an orderly unfolding of story and character. D H Lawrence expressed in his work a concern for the influence of industrialization upon society and the individual. Aldous Huxley similarly used the 20th-century novel as a forum to express his fears about a society that controls the individual, most notably in Brave New World (1932).

During the 1950s a group of novelists who chose working-class settings for their books attracted attention, and were loosely referred to as the ‘Angry Young Men’. They included John Wain, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and David Storey; each had a distinctive approach to the novel.

The novel continues to flourish as a form. Although it is recent, compared with poetry and drama, the novel has perhaps covered the widest range of tastes and interests. The distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ novels has become increasingly blurred, with detective novels such as the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle now regarded as classics and ‘serious’ novelists employing the techniques traditionally associated with genres such as the thriller and science fiction. Late-20th-century English writers of note include Anthony Powell, Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, and Vikram Seth.