name the different kind of novel and explain any two? answer in english
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Answer:
A novel on Alexander the Great or Joan of Arc can be as flimsy and superficial as any schoolgirl romance. But historical themes, to which may be added prehistoric or mythical ones, have inspired the greatest novelists, as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma reveal. In the 20th century, distinguished historical novels such as Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators (1939), Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934), Zoé Oldenbourg’s Destiny of Fire (1960), and Mary Renault’s The King Must Die (1958) exemplify an important function of the fictional imagination—to interpret remote events in human and particular terms, to transform documentary fact, with the assistance of imaginative conjecture, into immediate sensuous and emotional experience.
There is a kind of historical novel, little more than a charade, which frequently has a popular appeal because of a common belief that the past is richer, bloodier, and more erotic than the present. Such novels, which include such immensely popular works as those of Georgette Heyer, or Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel stories in England in the early 20th century, and Forever Amber (1944) by Kathleen Winsor in the United States, may use the trappings of history but, because there is no real assimilation of the past into the imagination, the result must be a mere costume ball. On the other hand, the American novelist John Barth showed in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) that mock historical scholarship—preposterous events served up with parodic pomposity—could constitute a viable, and not necessarily farcical, approach to the past. Barth’s history is cheerfully suspect, but his sense of historical perspective is genuine.
It is in the technical conservatism of most European historical novels that the serious student of fiction finds cause to relegate the category to a secondary place. Few practitioners of the form seem prepared to learn from any writer later than Scott, though Virginia Woolf—in Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941)—made bold attempts to squeeze vast tracts of historical time into a small space and thus make them as fictionally manageable as the events of a single day. And John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., which can be taken as a historical study of a phase in America’s development, is a reminder that experiment is not incompatible with the sweep and amplitude that great historical themes can bring to the novel.
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