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    The English Novel: Origins and Growth

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    The English Novel: Origins and Growth

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    5 views21 pages

    The English Novel: Origins and Growth

    Uploaded by

    Ahmed Ali

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 21

    The English Novel

    Origins and Growth


    What is a novel?

    • Novel – novella – new


    • A work of extended prose fiction (usually) with
    plot and developed characters
    • Many sub-genres
    What came before?
    Early forms of story-telling

    • Epic poetry / Romance


    • Subject matter: classical, mythical, religious figures
    and adventures – familiar stories
    • Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde 1380s
    • Malory: Morte D’Arthur 1469
    • Spenser: Faerie Queene 1590
    • Often symbolic / allegorical
    • Not aiming for psychological realism or fully
    developed characters
    17th Century Origins:

    • lots of prose writing: journalism, essays, sermons


    • Some fiction but very sentimental, weak,
    sensational, underdeveloped – focus on crime
    stories, pirates, murders, bigamy and incest
    • Cervantes - Don Quixote 1605 + 1615
    • John Bunyan – Pilgrim’s Progress 1678
    • Aphra Behn – Oroonoko 1688 - early
    psychological realism
    Why the 18 Century?
    th

    • Growth of middle class


    • Increasing literacy
    • Cheaper and easier printing and publication
    • Increased leisure time – esp for women
    • https://
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib43SssdAAc 6
    minute video
    Beginnings of Realism
    • Distinguished “modern” novel from forerunners
    • Move away from mythical / historical
    • Middle class characters
    • Contemporary setting
    • Focus on individual experience
    • Focus on internal life
    • Domestic / realistic situations and problems
    • Increasing focus on “the original and the novel”
    Early 18 Century
    th

    • Defoe: Robinson Crusoe


    • Swift: Gulliver’s Travels 1726*
    “Greatest” 18th Century novelists

    • Richardson: Clarissa (1747-8)


    • Fielding: The History of Tom Jones(1749)
    • Sterne: Tristram Shandy (1759)
    • Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
    • Smollett: The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
    (1751)
    18 C Plot - 2 main types
    th

    • Focus on an individual – real people rather than mythical


    figures
    EITHER
    • 1st person narrative – diary or letters
    • confession of female emotions
    • Eg. Clarissa

    OR
    • 3rd person, male hero, picaresque style travels and
    adventures, actions, vulgarity
    • Eg. Tom Jones
    18 C Typical Plot
    th

    • an unhappy love affair: lower-class virtuous beauty and a


    gentleman
    • unable to unite due social constraints.
    • sudden revelation puts everything in order:
    • Eg. as a baby the heroine was swapped by a nurse and is in fact a
    daughter of some lord, which makes it possible for them to
    marry.

    • Provides topics of universal relevance,: love, family relations and


    average everyday problems
    • AND constant emotional drama, extraordinary beauty and
    exciting adventure,
    18th Century Styles :

    • Picaresque – Moll Flanders


    • Epistolary - Clarissa
    • Self-conscious narrator – Tom Jones
    • Didactic - Rasselas
    • Fictional biography – Robinson Crusoe
    • Satirical – Gulliver’s Travels
    • Sentimental / sensibility - Pamela
    Women Readers
    Moral Panic!
    • The depravity is universal … foolish, yet dangerous,
    books
    • mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the
    imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children
    were crying for bread
    • mere habit of novel-reading as a physically harmful
    waste of time, damaging not only the mind and the
    morale of readers, but also their eyesight and posture.
    • Circulating libraries: the “evergreen tree of the
    diabolical knowledge”
    Mr Collins in “Pride and Prejudice”
    Mr. Bennet was … glad to invite him to
    read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins
    readily assented, and a book was
    produced; but, on beholding it (for
    everything announced it to be from a
    circulating library), he started back,
    and begging pardon, protested that he
    never read novels. Kitty stared at him,
    and Lydia exclaimed. Other books
    were produced, and after some
    deliberation he chose Fordyce’s
    Sermons. Lydia gaped as he opened
    the volume, and before he had, with
    very monotonous solemnity, read
    three pages, she interrupted him
    Romantic: Late 18th Century – 1837
    Austen – transition to 19th
    century style
    Plots: middle class girls
    seeking husbands
    Style: wit, irony and satire
    Underlying issues: social and
    economic dependence of
    women on marriage
    Scott - the historical novel:
    Ivanhoe (1820)
    Gothic
    • Uses mystery and suspense to produce a
    (pleasurable) sensation of fear in the reader
    • Horace Walpole: Castle of Otranto 1764
    • Anne Radcliffe: 5 best sellers 1789 – 1797
    • Mary Shelley: Frankenstein 1818
    • Emphasis on terror + vulnerable heroine
    • Aimed at young female readers
    Victorian 1837 – 1901

    • Leading literary genre


    • rise of women novelists: Brontes, Gaskell, Eliot
    • 3 volumes
    • Monthly serialisation – Dickens and Thackeray
    • 1830s -40s: the social novel – Oliver Twist
    • The Woman Question
    • Realism – the dominant literary style
    Victorian Novels
    • Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
    • Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
    • Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
    • George Eliot: Middlemarch
    • WM Thackeray: Vanity Fair
    • Anthony Trollope: The Warden
    • Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
    • Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South
    • Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
    19 Century Realism
    th

    • Problems of ordinary people rendered with


    close attention to detail and complexities of
    social life
    • Cf Gothic, Romance etc
    • Middlemarch by George Eliot
    Middlemarch. Chapter 15docx.docx
    • Madame Bovary by Flaubert
    Modernism – early 20 century
    th

    • Esp post WW1


    • Rejection of 19th century
    realism
    • Breaking conventions of
    chronology and narration
    • Stream of consciousness
    • James Joyce: Ulysses
    • Virginia Woolf: Mrs
    Dalloway
    • DH Lawrence: The Rainbow
    Wider Reading
    • See Reading List reading listx.docx
    • The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt

    • European Literature
    • Dumas
    • Flaubert
    • Tolstoy
    • Dostoyevsky
    • Hugo

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