Rise of Novel in England
“Other great types of literature, like
epic, poetry, the romance, and the drama were first produced by other nations;
but the idea of the modern novel seems to have been worked out largely on
English soil.” (History of English Literature, WJ Long)
Virginia Woolf writes, “A novel is a
work of art” which according to Forster “should consist of about 50,000 words.”
It has a remote origin in the medieval romance, a tale of love and adventure
and the classical epic, for and the Renaissance, a prose tale was called a
novella (“A short new thing”, “News”). It was developed by Giovanni Boccaccio
who, in 1350 wrote a collection of love stories in prose, Decameron (1471).
Novel, according to French critic Abel
Chevalley, “is a fiction in prose of a certain length,” so the history of
English novel can be made with Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countless of
Pembrooeke’s Arcadia, a complex prose romance of the ship-wrecked princess,
beautiful princess, and chivalric adventure and remained popular until 18th century.
John Lyly’s Ephesus (1578) and Ephesus and
hisEngland reduce story to a minimum but they are brilliant in
discussion of manners, sentiments and moral reflection. Robert Greene’s Pondosto (1585)
which Shakespeare used for The Winter’s Taledescribes the “low”
life of Elizabethan London—the thieves, the rogues, the drabs, their tricks and
their victims.
Thomas Lodge tried friction both ways,
with a story in Sydney’s manner, entitle Rosalynde (1590)
and with realistic pamphlets. Thomas Deloney describes the work of craftsmen in
his simple realistic narratives. The Gentleman Craft tells the
whole story of the show-makers with some vivid and seemingly authentic scenes.
Thomas Dekker successfully portrays the low life of London in Guls
Horn Booke (1609). Thomas Nash made some progress in the direction of
form in his realistic narratives. In Jack Wilton his rogue
hero begins his carrier in the army of Henry VIII and in his travels meets a
number of living people. Here is the nearest approach to the realistic novel
which the 16thcentury has produced.
Clara Reeve describes the novel as a
“picture of real life and manners, and of time in which it is written,” and in
the second half of the 17th century, after the end of Civic
Wars, writers were left with some leisure for prose fiction. Samuel Peppys and
John Evelyn in their dairies created new atmosphere for fiction writing. John
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Life and Death
of Mr. Badman combine allegory with narrative which is a realistic
story, contemporary and authentic. The union on realism and spiritual
experience is presented in The Abounding with all
these earlier development of the novel it is left to the 18th C
to consolidate fiction in a form of literature and from that time onwards these
was no cessation in novel writing.
A beginning is made with an enthralling
and mystical figure, Daniel Defoe. W.E. Williamson thinks, novel is “a long
narrative in prose detailing the actions of fictitious people” and it is quite
true with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The story had its basis, in
fact, in the adventure of Alexander Selkirk, the sailor who lived alone for
years on the island of Juan Fernandez. Crusoe lands on an
uninhabited island and somehow managers to live there for several years, until
he is rescued from there by a lucky chance by a passing ship of his own
country.
Another famous travelogue is Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In this romance, Gulliver lands on
several islands inhabited by such strange creatures as the Lilliputians,
Houyhnhnms, Brobdingnags, and Yahoos. However, Swift’s episodes in these
adventures have a very pungent satire on contemporary political situations.
Then follow the picaresque novels Captain Singleton with
piracy and Africa in its background, a vivid tale, and the ‘female
rogues’ Moll Flanders and more elegantRoxanoe ,
are among the most lively of his creation.
Henry Fielding maintains the novel as
“a comic epic in prose” and his Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews,
and Jonathan Wild, and Smollett’s Adventures of the
Roderick Random are its best example in the Picaresque Novels. The
heroes or heroines of these novels are themselves bad characters. Four
wheels wrote the first classic English novels and set high standards and models
for this new form. InPamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48),
written in the form of letters exchanged between lovers, friends, and kinsmen, Richardson brought
to a traditional theme of the older romances—a young woman's defense of her
chastity—a psychological realism still unsurpassed. Fielding, in Joseph
Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749), and Amelia (1751),
depicted contemporary life and morals with a generosity combined with great
classical learning, enabling him to write what he called “comic epic.”
Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) followed a picaresque hero
against a vivid panorama of lower-class society. The Expedition of
Humphry Clinker (1771), also by Smollett, was gentler in its social
criticism, but the comedy is merciless in its depiction of human foibles and vanities.
Between 1760 and 1767 Sterne turned the novel inside out with his comic
masterpiece The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, in which the
hero, who is the narrator, is not born until halfway through the book. Sterne
had no real successors until James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who investigated
the relations between life on the one hand and literature and language on the
other.
In novel the controversy between rules
and taste continued but here, two factor made the controversy much less
instance and lively than the controversy in poetry and drama criticism.
Firstly, the novel had newly emerged and it had no theory or rules of its own
available in any ancient or preceding period. Secondly, it emerged as
literature of the middleclass, which was also new and without any tradition
behind. Fielding along among the novelists of the age was a conscious artist
who tried to forge a theory of the novel drawn from the existing models of epic
and drama. The result was an episodic plot leaving large scope for a variety of
incidents and characters, a mixed form allowing tragic endings with comic
interludes as well as comic endings with tragic situations, and a middle style
providing scope for serious contemplations as well as farcical flourishes.
Many critics divided the novel into two
classes: stories and romance. The novels are otherwise divided into novels of
personality like, The Vicar Wakefield and Silas Marner;
historical novel, likeIvanhoe; the novel of romance like Lorna
Donne; and the novel of purpose, like Oliver Twist, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. All such classifications are imperfect, and the best of them
is to open the objections.
Many categories of the novel became
recognizable in the 18th century, although they were rarely self-contained or
mutually exclusive. One was the didactic novel, in which theories of education
and politics were expressed. Most famous was the French philosopher Jean
Jacques Rousseau's Emile(1762). An English didactic novel was Caleb
Williams (1794), by the political philosopher William Godwin; this
work may also be seen as an example of the Gothic novel. The first Gothic novel
was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Later
examples are Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),
Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), and Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley's Frankenstein(1818).
One of the most enduring genres in the
English novel is the comedy of manners, which is concerned with the clash,
mirrored in speech and behavior, between characters formed by particular
cultural and social conditions. Perhaps the first writer in the genre was Fanny
Burney (Evelina, 1778; Cecilia, 1782), but the great
exemplar was Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma,
1816). Her abiding theme is ostensibly that of young women securing, or not
securing, husbands; her underlying serious concern is with the attainment of
self-knowledge. Such are Austen's wit, irony, and psychological perception,
allied with her strict sense of correct social behavior, that she is the
unchallenged genius of the genre.
Thus, Neo Classicism movement in
English literature, which began under the influence of philosophic materialism,
scientific empiricism, and literary classicism, and resulted in the production
of the comic drama of manners, the poetry of wit, and the prose of common
sense, gave way, at its end, to emerging philosophic transcendentalism,
scientific associations, and literary romanticism, which resulted in the
creation of poetic drama (more of a dramatic poem, in fact), the poetry of
emotion, and the prose of sentiment. However the percept and epigram, the
satire and the Mock-heroic (epic), of the age of Dryden and Pope, or the age of
prose and reason, might have been discarded by the subsequent generations of
the writers, its gift of essay and novel, to debate and criticism, continued
long after the Neo-Classical movement had gone out of fashion, but before we
take up literature of the Romantic period for discussion, we need to look into
the literature that provided a transitional link between the Neo-Classical and
the Romantic. This literature had appeared on the last quarter of the
eighteenth century or thereabout is called “pre-Romantic literature.”
Since the flowering time of the novel
in the second half of nineteenth century, the novel has displayed all other literary
forms in popularity, and has replaced long verse narratives almost entirely.
The novelistic art has received the devoted attention of some of the supreme
craftsmen of modern literature—Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Thackeray, H.G.
Wells, R.L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, And James Joyce. These
great craftsmen have made the novel “a pocket theatre (Marion Crawford)”
exhibiting the both “within and without of us”. It is the most effective medium
for the portrayal of the human thought and action combining in itself the
creation of poetry with the details of history and the generalized experience
of philosophy, in a manner unattempted by any previous effort of human genius”.
(Worsford)
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