A novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century.

The further definition of the genre is historically difficult. Most of the criteria (such as artistic merit, fictionality, a design to create an epic totality of life, a focus on history and the individual) are arbitrary and designed to raise further debates over qualities that will supposedly separate great works of literature both from a wider and lower "trivial" production and from the field of true histories. To become part of the literary production novels have to address the discussion of art. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the work of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The individualism of the presentation makes the personal memoir and the autobiography the two closest relatives among the genres of modern histories.

Definition

Gerard ter Borch, young man reading a book c.1680, the format is that of a French period novel.

Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book, 1756 – religious and scientific reading has a different iconography.

Winslow Homer, The New Novel (1877), again reading in a relaxed position

Urban commuter reading a novel, Berlin 2009.

The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.

A fictional narrative

Fictionality and the presentation in a narrative are the two features most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. In a historical perspective they are problematic criteria. Histories were supposed to be narrative projects throughout the early modern period. Their authors could include inventions as long as they were rooted in traditional knowledge or in order to orchestrate a certain passage. Historians would thus invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political, and personal realities of a place and period with a clarity and detail historians would not dare to explore.

The line between history and novel is eventually drawn between the debates novelists and historians are supposed to address in the West and wherever the Western pattern of debates has been introduced: Novels are supposed to show qualities of literature and art. Histories are by contrast supposed to be written in order to fuel a public debate over historical responsibilities. A novel can hence deal with history. It will be analyzed, however, with a look at the almost timeless value it is supposed to show in the hands of private readers as a work of art.

The critical demand is a source of constant argument: Does the specific novel have these "eternal qualities" of art, this "deeper meaning" an interpretation tries to reveal? The debate itself had positive effects. It allowed critics to cherish fictions that are clearly marked as such. The novel is not a historical forgery, it does not hide the fact that it was made with a certain design. The word novel can appear on book covers and title pages; the artistic effort or the sheer suspense created can find a remark in a preface or on the blurb. Once it is stated that this is a text whose craftsmanship we should acknowledge literary critics will be responsible for the further discussion. The new responsibility (historians were the only qualified critics up into the 1750s) made it possible to publicly disqualify much of the previous fictional production: Both the early 18th-century roman a clef and its fashionable counterpart, the nouvelle historique, had offered narratives with – by and large scandalous – historical implications. Historians had discussed them with a look at facts they had related. The modern literary critic who became responsible for fictions in the 1750s offered a less scandalous debate: A work is "literature", art, if it has a personal narrative, heroes to identify with, fictional inventions, style and suspense – in short anything that might be handled with the rather personal ventures of creativity and artistic freedom. It may relate facts with scandalous accuracy, or distort them; yet one can ignore any such work as worthless if it does not try to be an achievement in the new field of literary works[1] – it has to compete with works of art and invention, not with true histories. The new scandal is if it fails to offer literary merits.

Historians reacted and left much of their own previous "medieval" and "early modern" production to the evaluation of literary critics. New histories discussed public perceptions of the past – the decision that turned them into the perfect platform on which one can question historical liabilities in the West. Fictions, allegedly an essentially personal subject matter, became, on the other hand, a field of materials that call for a public interpretation: they became a field of cultural significance to be explored with a critical and (in the school system) didactic interest in the subjective perceptions both of artists and their readers.

Distinct literary prose

The first so called "romances" had been verse epics in the Romance language of southern France. Works like Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales appeared in verse much later.[2]

Prose – easy to translate and unlike verse pleasant to read in private silence – won the market of European fiction in the 15th century and immediately developed a special style with models both in Greek and Roman histories and the traditions of verse narratives. The development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that did not aim at forging history but at works readers would actually identify and appreciate as fictions.

The style that became characteristic of the modern novel is for the early modern period closely connected to the development of elegance in the belles lettres. With the beginning of the 16th century the printed market had created a special demand for books that were neither simply published for the non academic audience nor explicitly scientific literature – but a production of style, of elegance and of class as long as class was rather defined by fashionable behaviour than by a distinct social status. The belles lettres became this field as a compound of genres including modern history and science in the vernaculars, personal memoirs, present political scandal, fiction and poetry. Prose fiction was in this wider spectrum soon the driving force creating the distinct style as it allowed the artistic experiment and the personal touch of the author who could market his or her style as a fashion. Verse, rhetoric and science were by contrast highly restricted areas. Fictional prose remained close to everyday language, to the private letter, to the art of "gallant" conversation, to the personal memoir and travelogue.[3]

18th-century authors eventually criticized the French ideals of elegance the belles lettres had promoted. A less aristocratic style of English reformed novels became the ideal in the 1740s. The requirements of style changed again in the 1760s when prose fiction became part of the newly formed literary production. The more normal it became to open novels with a simple statement of their fictionality (for example by labelling them as "a novel"), the less interesting it became to imitate true histories with an additional touch of style. Novels of the 1760s such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy began to explore prose fiction as an experimental field. Novels of the ensuing romantic period played with the fragment and open-endedness. Modern late 19th and early 20th century fiction continued the deconstruction attacking the clear author-reader communication and developing models of texts to be evaluated as such. Modern literary criticism acted in the experimental field as a constant provider of historical models. Authors who write fiction gain critical attention as soon as they search a position in future histories of literature, whether as innovators or traditionalists. The situation is – in a historical perspective – new: An awareness of traditions has only grown after the publication of Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances (1670). It has reached the public only with greater impact since the 1830s.

Media requirements: Paper and print

The evolution of prose fiction required cheap carrier media. Unlike verse, prose can hardly be remembered with precision. Oral traditions had helped prose narrators with stock narrative patterns as employed in fairy tales[4] and with complex plot structures, whose point they could only reach if they told the story correctly (the novels of Boccaccio and Chaucer share this mode of construction with modern jokes, the shortest form of prose narratives still circulating in oral traditions).

Contents

Novel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Definition

A fictional narrative

Distinct literary prose

Media requirements: Paper and print