write a note on Rise of the novel
Answers
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.