THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

Novel = extended fictional prose narrative, disregards the constraints that govern
other literary forms, and acknowledges no obligatory structure, style, or subjectmatter. Thriving on this openness and flexibility, the novel has become the most
important literary genre of the modern age, superseding the epic, the romance, and
other narrative forms.
novel differs from the prose romance in that a greater degree of realism is expected of
it, and that it tends to describe a recognizable secular social world, often in a skeptical and
prosaic manner inappropriate to the marvels of romance.
novel has frequently incorporated the structures and languages of non-fictional prose
forms (history, autobiography, journalism, travel writing), even to the point where the
non-fictional element outweighs the fictional.
Although some ancient prose narratives like Petronius' Satyricon (1st century) can be
called novels, and although some significant forerunners of the novelincluding Francois
Rabelais's Gargantua (1534)appeared in the 16th century, it is the publication in Spain of
the first part of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote de la Mancha in 1605 that is most widely
accepted as announcing the arrival of the true novel. In England Daniel Defoe is regarded as
the founder of the English novel with his Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722).
ROMANCE, - fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of
idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting (heroes embarking on a spiritual
quest)
or, more generally, a tendency in fiction opposite to that of realism.
The term now embraces many forms of fiction from the gothic novel and the popular
escapist love story to the 'scientific romances' of H. G. Wells, but it usually refers to the tales
of King Arthur's knights written in the late Middle Ages by Chretien de Troyes, Sir Thomas
Malory (chivalric romance).
Medieval romance is distinguished from epic by its concentration on courtly love rather
than warlike heroism. Long, elaborate romances were written during the Renaissance,
including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532), Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
(1590-6), and Sir Philip Sidney's prose romance Arcadia (1590), but Cervantes's parody of
romances in Don Quixote (1605) helped to undermine this tradition. Later prose romances
(e.g. Nathaniel Hawthorne) differ from novels in their preference for allegory and
psychological exploration rather than realistic social observation
18th c novel boundless expansion
- in their own time: called histories, romances, adventures, lives, tales,
expeditions, fortunes & misfortunes, & ultimately novels - lack of any
consensus about what the term novel meant
- term: as early as the 17th c (e.g. Congreves preface to Incognita, 1692) but
general use: not until end of 18th c
- literary historians variously credit Richardson, Defoe or Aphra Behn (Oroonoko, or
The Royal Slave) as the founder of the English novel, thus dating its beginning
from the 1740s, the 1710s, or the 1680s (much earlier examples: Spanish & French
novels, a few classical precedents in ancient Greece)
Attempt to give an account of the birth of a genre, the novel literary theorists & critics
from late 18th c to the present day genealogical project the novel (heterogeneous, hybrid
form) is read & reread for the marks of its ancestry, variously located in:
- the epic; fable; romance; ballad;
- discourse of journalism;
- rise of the middle class & decline of aristocracy;
- emergence of a female reading public;

atmosphere of literary effervescence (clubs and coffee houses);

development of a commercial book trade (industrial progress, development of
printing press interested in publishing English novels & translations serial
publication in periodicals)

20th c theories of the rise of the novel: formalism v. historicism

FORMALISM
HISTORICISM
- the hybrid form of the novel: one of 2
- Historicist critics: ascribe generic
origins
development to non-textual causes
- 1. born out of a synthesis of a number
(changes in social, economic, political
of formal properties displayed by different
conditions)
genres & sub-genres prior to its emergence
- (~~ formalist): novel is figured as an
- 2. reaction to previous genres
essentially problem-solving/syncretic
- i.e. the novel product of purely formal
genre: it resolves class/gender (rather than
causes (literary history bears little/no relation generic) conflict on the level of ideology
to social/economic/ political history; it
- i.e.: changes in the mode of production/
renews & transforms itself only when literary social organization/ philosophical notions of
& rhetorical strategies have become
the human subject = registered & responded
conventional/ worn-out)
to in the novel form
- Michael McKeon, The Origins of the
- account of the rise of the bourgeois
English Novel, 1987 influenced by Bakhtin: hero/ine in narrative fiction of the early
modern period
the novel a stable category; = a discursive
- link: bourgeois political hegemony & the
field that is constituted through a complex
cultural hegemony of the novel form
interchange of socio-historical & formal
factors
-

Antagonism: (critical dichotomies) Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1957
Sought to explain formal change as a register of social change in the early to mid-18 th c
under the sway of 2 new social forces (Puritanism & capitalism) emphasis on historical
specificity positions the discourse of fiction in relation to other discourses of power
(sexual/economic/religious)

Triple rise thesis about the novels origin: rise of the middle class/ rise of literacy/ rise
of the novel = related & nearly simultaneous (the broad social range of readership, not
confined to a particular class or group)

the primary aim of prose fiction in the 18th c was to provide, through a number of
innovative formal strategies a convincing representation (realism) of middle-class experience
and ideology