what is the rise of novel
Answers
Answer:
The rise of the novel
Article written by:
John Mullan
Themes:
Rise of the novel, Politeness, sensibility and sentimentalism
Published:
21 Jun 2018
John Mullan explains how the novel took shape in the 18th century with the works of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, and the ways in which the book industry both shaped and responded to the new genre.
The publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 was an extraordinary event in the history of literature. There had been prose narratives before this book, but never so sustained a fictional account of one individual’s experiences. This man’s story was singular and new. What distinguished Robinson Crusoe were elements that now seem essential to the novel as a genre. It told of an ordinary individual, even if his ordeals were extraordinary. It placed great emphasis on his inner life, though understood mostly in spiritual terms. And, above all, in the very manner of its narration, it asked the reader to believe in its ‘probability’. In the first decades of the English novel, this was the most common word for what made a narrative believable. In the case of Robinson Crusoe, it involved the narrator’s unwavering commitment to minute, objective description and circumstantial detail, Daniel Defoe’s brilliantly unliterary prose doing justice to the facts of one particular person’s experience.
For Defoe, steeped in the works of devout Protestant autobiographers such as John Bunyan, narration meant religious self-inspection. Crusoe tells us that ‘my Story is a whole Collection of Wonders’ – that word ‘Wonders’ capturing both the narrator’s own amazement at his fortunes, and his dawning recognition of the influence of God’s care and guidance in his life. He is placed on the desert island, with only a Bible and the natural world to instruct him and ample time to look into his heart to understand the errors of his sinful past. Most of Defoe’s subsequent novels – Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack and Roxana among them – are memoirs of remorseful rogues who have learnt religion from experience and introspection. All of his novels presented themselves on their title pages as if they were autobiographies. None bore Defoe’s name as their author. Indeed, there is evidence that one of them, The Journal of the Plague Year, was widely received as a true account of the experience of the Great Plague of 1665.
The word ‘novel’
So the novel begins as if it were a ‘true’ story. Yet Defoe’s fiction was not noticed by contemporary literary critics, and not included in discussions of the best literature of the age. From the number of editions that were published we know that his fiction was popular, but it was not regarded as properly literary. Many of his novels were lumped together in the public imagination with the published accounts of criminal lives that were popular in the period. Readers were not yet aware that a new genre was with them. The preface to Robinson Crusoe has many words for the narrative – ‘Story’, ‘Adventures’, ‘Account’, ‘Life’, ‘History’, ‘Fact’ – but none of them is that word ‘novel’. It is significant that readers did not yet use this word to describe this new genre. The noun existed, but it referred to what we might call a short story or novella: a genre of brief tales, often of forbidden romantic entanglements, usually published in collections. Many of the leading writers of these were women, of whom Delarivière Manley and Eliza Haywood were the most famous. Defoe’s last novel Roxana, the fictional memoir of a Restoration courtesan, owes something to this briefly dominant sub-genre of prose fiction, featuring as it does the scandalous affairs of courtly men and women.