|
Definition of the Novel
excerpted from A Handbook to Literature, 7th ed. by William Harmon and C.
Hugh Holman "Novel is used in its broadest sense to designate any extended fictional narrative almost always in prose. In practice, however, its use is customarily restricted to narrative in which the representation of character occurs either in a static condition or in the process of development as the result of events or actions. ... The term novel is an English counterpart of the Italian novella, a short compact, broadly realistic tale popular in the medieval period and best represented by those in the Decameron. In most European counties the word roman is used rather than novel, thus linking the novel with the older romance, of which, in a sense, the novel is an extension. The conflict between the imaginative recreation of experience implied in roman and the realistic representation of the soiled world of common people implied in novel has been present in the form from its beginning, and it accounted for a distinction often made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the romance and the novel, in which the romance was the tale of the long ago, the far away, or the imaginatively improbable; whereas, the novel was bound by the facts of the actual world and the laws of probability. ... The nineteenth century saw the flowering of the English novel as an instrument portraying middle-class society. Jane Austen produced novels of manners, and Scott created the historical novel and carried it to a high point in the first quarter of the century. The great Victorian novelists -- Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope -- created vast fictional worlds loaded with an abundance of social types and arranged in intricate melodramatic plots. In Thomas Hardy and George Eliot the last half of the century found writers, who, in differing degrees, applied some of the tenets of Naturalism.
|
