THE EMERGENCE OF THE NOVEL

Source: Hawthorn, Jeremy (2001): Studying the Novel. London: Arnold.

[Chapter 2: “History, genre, culture”, pp. 15-39; Glossary of terms, pp. 148-166.]

(1) When was the novel born?

 “Novel”  “newness” & “originality” (18th century)

 Influenced by previous fictions:
o Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605-15)
o Mythology, folklore
o 12th-century French romances
 Chivalric (epic heroes, courtly life, rigid and sophisticated conventions of behaviour)
 Supernatural elements
 Features of previous fiction:
o In verse
o Not concerned with the real life of past of present times aristocratic values / interest in
investigating the low life of the individual
o Characters not individualized  “types” instead of believable individuals (“typification” vs
“individuation”)
 Features of the novel:
o Interest in middle-class values (connected to growth of the middle class in 18th-century Britain)
o Concern with the everyday
o Rejection of the supernatural

(2) Factors crucial to its development

1. Rise in literacy  middle-class demand for education and moral training (“docere et delectare”)
2. Printing
3. New notions of history & historical progression  concern with realism / verisimilitude (narrative
techniques to achieve this: first-person narrator / Aristotelian mimesis / epistolary style / anti-romance)
4. Market economy  capitalist values (rising obsession with investment and capital accumulation)
5. Stress in individualism  the individual as the essential social unit
6. Increased secularism
7. Influence of Protestant values (ex. Robinson Crusoe)
8. Urban experience
9. More rights for women
10. “Movement”, travel and mobility
a. Social movement (industrialism, market economy)
Ex: Moll Flanders, Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre…
b. Geographical movement (improvement in means of transport, imperialism)
Ex: Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein…
c. The linearity of narrativethe individual human life journeying from birth to death
11. Imperialism
Ex: Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre…
12. Constant changes
The previous factors have made the novel:
- better suited to the representation of the individual than the collective
consciousness
- better suited to processes of linear development than to complexities of
simultaneity and reciprocal interaction
- better suited to the expressive need of a literate culture than to the need of an oral
one
But – it can adapt to, incorporate and develop the strengths of:
- rich oral and communal traditions
- new ideologies (Feminism, Postcolonialism)
- new narrative techniques
Ex: Postcolonial writers such as Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
(3) Main types of novels

 Epistolary novel (Samuel Richardson, Pamela [1740], Clarissa [1747-8])

 Picaresque novel (Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders [1722])

 “anti-novel” (Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy [1760-67])

 Gothic novel (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein [1818])

 Historical novel (Walter Scott, Ivanhoe [1819])

 Satirical novel (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels [1726])

 Magic realism (Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children [1981 influenced by Tristram Shandy]; Angela
Carter, The Passion of the New Eve [1977], Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow [2006], …)

 Postmodernist novel (David Lodge, Changing Places [1975])