A novel is a relatively long work of narrative
fiction, normally written in prose form, and
which is typically published as a book.
The entire genre has been seen as having "a
continuous and comprehensive history of about
two thousand years", with its origins in classical
Greece and Rome, in medieval and early modern
romance, and in the tradition of the Italian
renaissance novella. (Since the 18th century,
the term "novella", or "novelle" in German,
has been used in English and other European
languages to describe a long short story or
a short novel.)
Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji (1010) has
sometimes been described as the world's first
novel, but there is considerable debate over
this — there were certainly long fictional
works much earlier. Spread of printed books
in China led to the appearance of classical
Chinese novels by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
Parallel European developments occurred after
the invention of the printing press. Miguel
de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (the first
part of which was published in 1605), is frequently
cited as the first significant European novelist
of the modern era. Ian Watt, in The Rise of
the Novel (1957), suggested that the modern
novel was born in the early 18th century.
Walter Scott made a distinction between the
novel, in which (as he saw it) "events are
accommodated to the ordinary train of human
events and the modern state of society" and
the romance, which he defined as "a fictitious
narrative in prose or verse; the interest
of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon
incidents". However, many such romances, including
the historical romances of Scott, Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick,
are also frequently called novels, and Scott
describes romance as a "kindred term". This
sort of romance is in turn different from
the genre fiction love romance or romance
novel. Other European languages do not distinguish
between romance and novel: "a novel is le
roman, der Roman, il romanzo, en roman."
== Defining the genre ==
A novel is a long, fictional narrative which
describes intimate human experiences. The
novel in the modern era usually makes use
of a literary prose style. The development
of the prose novel at this time was encouraged
by innovations in printing, and the introduction
of cheap paper in the 15th century.
The present English (and Spanish) word for
a long work of prose fiction derives from
the Italian novella for "new", "news", or
"short story of something new", itself from
the Latin novella, a singular noun use of
the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive
of novus, meaning "new". Most European languages
use the word "romance" (as in French, Dutch,
Russian, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian,
Danish, Swedish and Norwegian "roman"; Finnish
"romaani"; German "Roman"; Portuguese "romance"
and Italian "romanzo") for extended narratives.
A fictional narrativeFictionality is most
commonly cited as distinguishing novels from
historiography. However this can be a problematic
criterion. Throughout the early modern period
authors of historical narratives would often
include inventions rooted in traditional beliefs
in order to embellish a passage of text or
add credibility to an opinion. Historians
would also 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 clarity
and detail not found in works of history.
Literary proseWhile prose rather than verse
became the standard of the modern novel, the
ancestors of the modern European novel include
verse epics in the Romance language of southern
France, especially those by Chrétien de Troyes
(late 12th century), and in Middle English
(Geoffrey Chaucer's (c. 1343 – 1400) The
Canterbury Tales). Even in the 19th century,
fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord
Byron's Don Juan (1824), Alexander Pushkin's
Yevgeniy Onegin (1833), and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), competed with
prose novels. Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate
(1986), composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is
a more recent example of the verse novel.
Content: intimate experienceBoth in 12th-century
Japan and 15th-century Europe, prose fiction
created intimate reading situations. On the
other hand, verse epics, including the Odyssey
and Aeneid, had been recited to a select audiences,
though this was a more intimate experience
than the performance of plays in theaters.
A new world of individualistic fashion, personal
views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties,
"conduct", and "gallantry" spread with novels
and the associated prose-romance.
LengthThe novel is today the longest genre
of narrative prose fiction, followed by the
novella. However, in the 17th century, critics
saw the romance as of epic length and the
novel as its short rival. A precise definition
of the differences in length between these
types of fiction, is, however, not possible.The
requirement of length has been traditionally
connected with the notion that a novel should
encompass the "totality of life."
== History ==
=== Early novels ===
Although early forms of the novel are to be
found in a number of places, including classical
Rome, 10th– and 11th-century Japan, and
Elizabethan England, the European novel is
often said to have begun with Don Quixote
in 1605.Early works of extended fictional
prose, or novels, include works in Latin like
the Satyricon by Petronius (c. 50 AD), and
The Golden Ass by Apuleius (c. 150 AD), works
in Ancient Greek such as Daphnis and Chloe
by Longus (c. late second century AD), A True
Story by Lucian of Samosata (2nd century),
or Aethiopica (3rd century), works in Sanskrit
such as the 4th or 5th century Vasavadatta
by Subandhu, 6th– or 7th-century Daśakumāracarita
and Avantisundarīkathā by Daṇḍin, and
in the 7th-century Kadambari by Banabhatta,
Murasaki Shikibu's 11th-century Japanese work
The Tale of Genji, the 12th-century Hayy ibn
Yaqdhan (or Philosophus Autodidactus, the
17th-century Latin title) by Ibn Tufail, who
wrote in Arabic, the 13th-century Theologus
Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, another Arabic
novelist, and Blanquerna, written in Catalan
by Ramon Llull (1283), and the 14th-century
Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo
Guanzhong.Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji
(1010) has been described as the world's first
novel and shows essentially all the qualities
for which Marie de La Fayette's novel La Princesse
de Clèves (1678) has been praised: individuality
of perception, an interest in character development,
and psychological observation. Urbanization
and the spread of printed books in Song Dynasty
(960–1279) China led to the evolution of
oral storytelling into fictional novels by
the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Parallel European
developments did not occur until after the
invention of the printing press by Johannes
Gutenberg in 1439, and the rise of the publishing
industry over a century later allowed for
similar opportunities.By contrast, Ibn Tufail's
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus
Autodidactus are works of didactic philosophy
and theology. In this sense, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
would be considered an early example of a
philosophical novel, while Theologus Autodidactus
would be considered an early theological novel.
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, with its story of a human
outcast surviving on an island, is also likely
to have influenced Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe (1719), because the work was available
in an English edition in 1711.Epic poetry
exhibits some similarities with the novel,
and the Western tradition of the novel reaches
back into the field of verse epics, though
again not in an unbroken tradition. The epics
of Asia, such as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh
(1300–1000 BC), and Indian epics such as
the Ramayana (400 BCE and 200 CE), and Mahabharata
(4th century BC) were as unknown in early
modern Europe as was the Anglo-Saxon epic
of Beowulf (c. 750–1000 AD), which was rediscovered
in the late 18th century and early 19th century.
Other non-European works, such as the Torah,
the Koran, and the Bible, are full of stories,
and thus have also had a significant influence
on the development of prose narratives, and
therefore the novel. Then at the beginning
of the 18th century, French prose translations
brought Homer's works to a wider public, who
accepted them as forerunners of the novel.
Classical Greek and Roman prose narratives
included a didactic strand, with the philosopher
Plato's (c. 425 – c. 348 BC) dialogues;
a satirical dimension with Petronius' Satyricon;
the incredible stories of Lucian of Samosata;
and Lucius Apuleius' proto-picaresque The
Golden Ass, as well as the heroic romances
of the Greeks Heliodorus and Longus. Longus
is the author of the Greek novel, Daphnis
and Chloe (2nd century AD).
=== Medieval period 1100–1500 ===
==== Chivalric Romances ====
Romance or chivalric romance is a type of
narrative in prose or verse popular in the
aristocratic circles of High Medieval and
Early Modern Europe. They were marvel-filled
adventures, often of a knight-errant with
heroic qualities, who undertakes a quest,
yet it is "the emphasis on heterosexual love
and courtly manners distinguishes it from
the chanson de geste and other kinds of epic,
which involve heroism." In later romances,
particularly those of French origin, there
is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of
courtly love.
Originally, romance literature was written
in Old French, Anglo-Norman and Occitan, later,
in English, Italian and German. During the
early 13th century, romances were increasingly
written as prose.
The shift from verse to prose dates from the
early 13th century. The Prose Lancelot or
Vulgate Cycle includes passages from that
period. This collection indirectly led to
Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur of the early
1470s. Prose became increasingly attractive
because it enabled writers to associate popular
stories with serious histories traditionally
composed in prose, and could also be more
easily translated.Popular literature also
drew on themes of romance, but with ironic,
satiric or burlesque intent. Romances reworked
legends, fairy tales, and history, but by
about 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel
de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in Don
Quixote (1605). Still, the modern image of
the medieval is more influenced by the romance
than by any other medieval genre, and the
word "medieval" evokes knights, distressed
damsels, dragons, and such tropes.Around 1800,
the connotations of "romance" were modified
with the development Gothic fiction.
==== The novella ====
The term "novel" originates from the production
of short stories, or novella that remained
part of a European oral culture of storytelling
into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes,
and humorous stories designed to make a point
in a conversation, and the exemplum a priest
would insert in a sermon belong into this
tradition. Written collections of such stories
circulated in a wide range of products from
practical compilations of examples designed
for the use of clerics to compilations of
various stories such as Boccaccio's Decameron
(1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
(1386–1400). The Decameron (1354) was a
compilation of one hundred novelle told by
ten people—seven women and three men—fleeing
the Black Death by escaping from Florence
to the Fiesole hills, in 1348.
=== Renaissance period: 1500–1700 ===
The modern distinction between history and
fiction did not exist in the early sixteenth
century and the grossest improbabilities pervade
many historical accounts found in the early
modern print market. William Caxton's 1485
edition of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur
(1471) was sold as a true history, though
the story unfolded in a series of magical
incidents and historical improbabilities.
Sir John Mandeville's Voyages, written in
the 14th century, but circulated in printed
editions throughout the 18th century, was
filled with natural wonders, which were accepted
as fact, like the one-footed Ethiopians who
use their extremity as an umbrella against
the desert sun. Both works eventually came
to be viewed as works of fiction.
In the 16th and 17th centuries two factors
led to the separation of history and fiction.
The invention of printing immediately created
a new market of comparatively cheap entertainment
and knowledge in the form of chapbooks. The
more elegant production of this genre by 17th-
and 18th-century authors were belles lettres—that
is, a market that would be neither low nor
academic. The second major development was
the first best-seller of modern fiction, the
Spanish Amadis de Gaula, by García Montalvo.
However, it was not accepted as an example
of belles lettres. The Amadis eventually became
the archetypical romance, in contrast with
the modern novel which began to be developed
in the 17th century.
==== Chapbooks ====
A chapbook is an early type of popular literature
printed in early modern Europe. Produced cheaply,
chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered
booklets, usually printed on a single sheet
folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages.
They were often illustrated with crude woodcuts,
which sometimes bore no relation to the text.
When illustrations were included in chapbooks,
they were considered popular prints. The tradition
arose in the 16th century, as soon as printed
books became affordable, and rose to its height
during the 17th and 18th centuries and Many
different kinds of ephemera and popular or
folk literature were published as chapbooks,
such as almanacs, children's literature, folk
tales, nursery rhymes, pamphlets, poetry,
and political and religious tracts.The term
"chapbook" for this type of literature was
coined in the 19th century. The corresponding
French and German terms are bibliothèque
bleue (blue book) and Volksbuch, respectively.
The principal historical subject matter of
chapbooks was abridgements of ancient historians,
popular medieval histories of knights, stories
of comical heroes, religious legends, and
collections of jests and fables. The new printed
books reached the households of urban citizens
and country merchants who visited the cities
as traders. Cheap printed histories were,
in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially
popular among apprentices and younger urban
readers of both sexes.The early modern market,
from the 1530s and 1540s, divided into low
chapbooks and high market expensive, fashionable,
elegant belles lettres. The Amadis and Rabelais'
Gargantua and Pantagruel were important publications
with respect to this divide. Both books specifically
addressed the new customers of popular histories,
rather than readers of belles lettres. The
Amadis was a multi–volume fictional history
of style, that aroused a debate about style
and elegance as it became the first best-seller
of popular fiction. On the other hand, Gargantua
and Pantagruel, while it adopted the form
of modern popular history, in fact satirized
that genre's stylistic achievements. The division,
between low and high literature, became especially
visible with books that appeared on both the
popular and belles lettres markets in the
course of the 17th and 18th centuries: low
chapbooks included abridgments of books such
as Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605/1615)
The term "chapbook" is also in use for present-day
publications, commonly short, inexpensive
booklets.
==== Heroic romances ====
Heroic Romance is a genre of imaginative literature,
which flourished in the 17th century, principally
in France.
The beginnings of modern fiction in France
took a pseudo-bucolic form, and the celebrated
L'Astrée, (1610) of Honore d'Urfe (1568–1625),
which is the earliest French novel, is properly
styled a pastoral. Although its action was,
in the main, languid and sentimental, there
was a side of the Astree which encouraged
that extravagant love of glory, that spirit
of " panache", which was now rising to its
height in France. That spirit it was which
animated Marin le Roy de Gomberville (1603–1674),
who was the inventor of what have since been
known as the Heroical Romances. In these there
was experienced a violent recrudescence of
the old medieval elements of romance, the
impossible valour devoted to a pursuit of
the impossible beauty, but the whole clothed
in the language and feeling and atmosphere
of the age in which the books were written.
In order to give point to the chivalrous actions
of the heroes, it was always hinted that they
were well-known public characters of the day
in a romantic disguise.
==== Satirical romances ====
Stories of witty cheats were an integral part
of the European novella with its tradition
of fabliaux. Significant examples include
Till Eulenspiegel (1510), Lazarillo de Tormes
(1554), Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus Teutsch
(1666–1668) and in England Richard Head's
The English Rogue (1665). The tradition that
developed with these titles focused on a hero
and his life. The adventures led to satirical
encounters with the real world with the hero
either becoming the pitiable victim or the
rogue who exploited the vices of those he
met.
A second tradition of satirical romances can
be traced back to Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring
(c. 1410) and to François Rabelais' Gargantua
and Pantagruel (1532–1564), which parodied
and satirized heroic romances, and did this
mostly by dragging them into the low realm
of the burlesque. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1606/1615)
modified the satire of romances: its hero
lost contact with reality by reading too many
romances in the Amadisian tradition.
Other important works of the tradition are
Paul Scarron's Roman Comique (1651–57),
the anonymous French Rozelli with its satire
on Europe's religions, Alain-René Lesage's
Gil Blas (1715–1735), Henry Fielding's Joseph
Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), and Denis
Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist (1773, printed
posthumously in 1796).
==== Histories ====
A market of literature in the modern sense
of the word, that is a separate market for
fiction and poetry, did not exist until the
late seventeenth century. All books were sold
under the rubric of "History and politicks"
in the early 18th century, including pamphlets,
memoirs, travel literature, political analysis,
serious histories, romances, poetry, and novels.
That fictional histories shared the same space
with academic histories and modern journalism
had been criticized by historians since the
end of the Middle Ages: fictions were "lies"
and therefore hardly justifiable at all. The
climate, however, changed in the 1670s.
The romance format of the quasi–historical
works of Madame d'Aulnoy, César Vichard de
Saint-Réal, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras,
and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, allowed
the publication of histories that dared not
risk an unambiguous assertion of their truth.
The literary market-place of the late 17th
and early 18th century employed a simple pattern
of options whereby fictions could reach out
into the sphere of true histories. This permitted
its authors to claim they had published fiction,
not truth, if they ever faced allegations
of libel.
Prefaces and title pages of 17th– and early
18th-century fiction acknowledged this pattern:
histories could claim to be romances, but
threaten to relate true events, as in the
Roman à clef. Other works could, conversely,
claim to be factual histories, yet earn the
suspicion that they were wholly invented.
A further differentiation was made between
private and public history: Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe was, within this pattern,
neither a "romance" nor a "novel". It smelled
of romance, yet the preface stated that it
should most certainly be read as a true private
history.
==== Cervantes and the modern novel ====
The rise of the novel as an alternative to
the romance began with the publication of
Cervantes' Novelas Exemplares (1613). It continued
with Scarron's Roman Comique (the first part
of which appeared in 1651), whose heroes noted
the rivalry between French romances and the
new Spanish genre.Late 17th-century critics
looked back on the history of prose fiction,
proud of the generic shift that had taken
place, leading towards the modern novel/novella.
The first perfect works in French were those
of Scarron and Madame de La Fayette's "Spanish
history" Zayde (1670). The development finally
led to her Princesse de Clèves (1678), the
first novel with what would become characteristic
French subject matter.Europe witnessed the
generic shift in the titles of works in French
published in Holland, which supplied the international
market and English publishers exploited the
novel/romance controversy in the 1670s and
1680s. Contemporary critics listed the advantages
of the new genre: brevity, a lack of ambition
to produce epic poetry in prose; the style
was fresh and plain; the focus was on modern
life, and on heroes who were neither good
nor bad. The novel's potential to become the
medium of urban gossip and scandal fuelled
the rise of the novel/novella. Stories were
offered as allegedly true recent histories,
not for the sake of scandal but strictly for
the moral lessons they gave. To prove this,
fictionalized names were used with the true
names in a separate key. The Mercure Gallant
set the fashion in the 1670s. Collections
of letters and memoirs appeared, and were
filled with the intriguing new subject matter
and the epistolary novel grew from this and
led to the first full blown example of scandalous
fiction in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between
a Nobleman and His Sister (1684/ 1685/ 1687).
Before the rise of the literary novel, reading
novels had only been a form of entertainment.However,
one of the earliest English novels, Daniel
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), has elements
of the romance, unlike these novels, because
of its exotic setting and story of survival
in isolation. Crusoe lacks almost all of the
elements found in these new novels: wit, a
fast narration evolving around a group of
young fashionable urban heroes, along with
their intrigues, a scandalous moral, gallant
talk to be imitated, and a brief, conciseness
plot. The new developments did, however, lead
to Eliza Haywood's epic length novel, Love
in Excess (1719/20) and to Samuel Richardson's
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741). Some literary
historians date the beginning of the English
novel with Richardson's Pamela, rather than
Crusoe.
=== 18th century novels ===
The idea of the "rise of the novel" in the
18th century is especially associated with
Ian Watt's influential study The Rise of the
Novel (1957). In Watt's conception, a rise
in fictional realism during the 18th century
came to distinguish the novel from earlier
prose narratives.
==== Philosophical novel ====
The rising status of the novel in 18th-century
can be seen in the development of philosophical
and experimental novels.
Philosophical fiction was not exactly new.
Plato's dialogues were embedded in fictional
narratives and his Republic is an early example
of a Utopia. The tradition of works of fiction
that were also philosophical texts continued
with Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Tommaso
Campanella's City of the Sun (1602). However,
the actual tradition of the philosophical
novel came into being in the 1740s with new
editions of More's work under the title Utopia:
or the happy republic; a philosophical romance
(1743). Voltaire wrote in this genre in Micromegas:
a comic romance, which is a biting satire
on philosophy, ignorance, and the self-conceit
of mankind (1752, English 1753). His Zadig
(1747) and Candide (1759) became central texts
of the French Enlightenment and of the modern
novel.An example of the experimental novel
is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767),
with its rejection of continuous narration.
In it the author not only addresses readers
in his preface but speaks directly to them
in his fictional narrative. In addition to
Sterne's narrative experiments, there has
visual experiments, such as a marbled page,
a black page to express sorrow, and a page
of lines to show the plot lines of the book.
The novel as a whole focuses on the problems
of language, with constant regard to John
Locke's theories in An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding.
==== The romance genre in the 18th century
====
The rise of the word novel at the cost of
its rival, the romance, remained a Spanish
and English phenomenon, and though readers
all over Western Europe had welcomed the novel(la)
or short history as an alternative in the
second half of the 17th century, only the
English and the Spanish had, however, openly
discredited the romance.But the change of
taste was brief and Fénelon's Telemachus
(1699/1700) already exploited a nostalgia
for the old romances with their heroism and
professed virtue. Jane Barker explicitly advertised
her Exilius as "A new Romance", "written after
the Manner of Telemachus", in 1715. Robinson
Crusoe spoke of his own story as a "romance",
though in the preface to the third volume,
published in 1720, Defoe attacks all who said
"that [...] the Story is feign'd, that the
Names are borrow'd, and that it is all a Romance;
that there never were any such Man or Place".
The late 18th century brought an answer with
the Romantic Movement's readiness to reclaim
the word romance, with the gothic romance,
and the historical novels of Walter Scott.
Robinson Crusoe now became a "novel" in this
period, that is a work of the new realistic
fiction created in the 18th century.
==== The sentimental novel ====
Sentimental novels relied on emotional responses,
and feature scenes of distress and tenderness,
and the plot is arranged to advance emotions
rather than action. The result is a valorization
of "fine feeling", displaying the characters
as models of refined, sensitive emotional
effect. The ability to display such feelings
was thought at this time to show character
and experience, and to help shape positive
social life and relationships.An example of
this genre is Samuel Richardson's Pamela,
or Virtue Rewarded (1740), composed "to cultivate
the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the
Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes", which focuses
on a potential victim, a heroine that has
all the modern virtues and who is vulnerable
because her low social status and her occupation
as servant of a libertine who falls in love
with her. She, however, ends in reforming
her antagonist.Male heroes adopted the new
sentimental character traits in the 1760s.
Laurence Sterne's Yorick, the hero of the
Sentimental Journey (1768) did so with an
enormous amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith's
Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Henry Mackenzie's
Man of Feeling (1771) produced the far more
serious role models.These works inspired a
sub- and counterculture of pornographic novels,
for which Greek and Latin authors in translations
had provided elegant models from the last
century. Pornography includes John Cleland's
Fanny Hill (1748), which offered an almost
exact reversals of the plot of novel's that
emphasised virtue. The prostitute Fanny Hill
learns to enjoy her work and establishes herself
as a free and economically independent individual,
in editions one could only expect to buy under
the counter.Less virtuous protagonists can
also be found in satirical novels, like Richard
Head's English Rogue (1665), that feature
brothels, while women authors like Aphra Behn
had offered their heroines alternative careers
as precursors of the 19th-century femmes fatales.>
The genre evolves in the 1770s with, for example,
Werther in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) realising
that it is impossible for him to integrate
into the new conformist society, and Pierre
Choderlos de Laclos in Les Liaisons dangereuses
(1782) showing a group of aristocrats playing
games of intrigue and amorality..
==== 
The social context of the 18th century novel
====
===== Changing cultural status =====
By around 1700, fiction was no longer a predominantly
aristocratic entertainment, and printed books
had soon gained the power to reach readers
of almost all classes, though the reading
habits differed and to follow fashions remained
a privilege. Spain was a trendsetter into
the 1630s but French authors superseded Cervantes,
de Quevedo, and Alemán in the 1640s. As Huet
was to note in 1670, the change was one of
manners. The new French works taught a new,
on the surface freer, gallant exchange between
the sexes as the essence of life at the French
court.
The situation changed again from 1660s into
the 1690s when works by French authors were
published in Holland out of the reach of French
censors. Dutch publishing houses pirated of
fashionable books from France and created
a new market of political and scandalous fiction.
This led to a market of European rather than
French fashions in the early 18th century.
By the 1680s fashionable political European
novels had inspired a second wave of private
scandalous publications and generated new
productions of local importance. Women authors
reported on politics and on their private
love affairs in The Hague and in London. German
students imitated them to boast of their private
amours in fiction. The London, the anonymous
international market of the Netherlands, publishers
in Hamburg and Leipzig generated new public
spheres. Once private individuals, such as
students in university towns and daughters
of London's upper class began write novels
based on questionable reputations, the public
began to call for a reformation of manners.An
important development in Britain, at the beginning
of the century, was that new journals like
The Spectator and The Tatler reviewed novels.
In Germany Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Briefe,
die neuste Literatur betreffend (1758) appeared
in the middle of the century with reviews
of art and fiction. By the 1780s such reviews
played had an important role in introducing
new works of fiction to the public.
Influenced by the new journals, reform became
the main goal of the second generation of
18th-century novelists. The Spectator Number
10 had stated that the aim was now "to enliven
morality with wit, and to temper wit with
morality […] to bring philosophy out of
the closets and libraries, schools and colleges,
to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables
and coffeehouses"). Constructive criticism
of novels had until then been rare. The first
treatise on the history of the novel was a
preface to Marie de La Fayette's novel Zayde
(1670).
A much later development was the introduction
of novels into school and later university
curricula.
===== The acceptance of novels as literature
=====
The French churchman and scholar Pierre Daniel
Huet's Traitté de l'origine des romans (1670)
laid the ground for a greater acceptance of
the novel as literature, that is comparable
to the classics, in the early 18th century.
The theologian had not only dared to praise
fictions, but he had also explained techniques
of theological interpretation of fiction,
which was a novelty. Furthermore, readers
of novels and romances could gain insight
not only into their own culture, but also
that of distant, exotic countries.When the
decades around 1700 saw the appearance of
new editions of the classical authors Petronius,
Lucian, and Heliodorus of Emesa. the publishers
equipped them with prefaces that referred
to Huet's treatise. and the canon it had established.
Also exotic works of Middle Eastern fiction
entered the market that gave insight into
Islamic culture. The Book of One Thousand
and One Nights was first published in Europe
from 1704 to 1715 in French, and then translated
immediately into English and German, and was
seen as a contribution to Huet's history of
romances.The English, Select Collection of
Novels in six volumes (1720–22), is a milestone
in this development of the novel's prestige.
It included Huet's Treatise, along with the
European tradition of the modern novel of
the day: that is, novella from Machiavelli's
to Marie de La Fayette's masterpieces. Aphra
Behn's novels had appeared in the 1680s but
became classics when reprinted in collections.
Fénelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) became a
classic three years after its publication.
New authors entering the market were now ready
to use their personal names rather than pseudonyms,
including Eliza Haywood, who in 1719 following
in the footsteps of Aphra Behn used her name
with unprecedented pride.
=== 19th century novels ===
==== 
Romanticism ====
The very word romanticism is connected to
the idea of romance, and the romance genre
experienced a revival, at the end of the 18th
century, with gothic fiction, that began in
1746 with English author Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto, subtitled (in its second
edition) "A Gothic Story". Other important
works are Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794) and 'Monk' Lewis's The Monk
(1795).
The new romances challenged the idea that
the novel involved a realistic depictions
of life, and destabilized the difference the
critics had been trying to establish, between
serious classical art and popular fiction.
Gothic romances exploited the grotesque, and
some critics thought that their subject matter
deserved less credit than the worst medieval
tales of Arthurian knighthood.The authors
of this new type of fiction were accused of
exploiting all available topics to thrill,
arouse, or horrify their audience. These new
romantic novelists, however, claimed that
they were exploring the entire realm of fictionality.
And psychological interpreters, in the early
19th century, read these works as encounters
with the deeper hidden truth of the human
imagination: this included sexuality, anxieties,
and insatiable desires. Under such readings,
novels were described as exploring deeper
human motives, and it was suggested that such
artistic freedom would reveal what had not
previously been openly visible.
The romances of de Sade, Les 120 Journées
de Sodome (1785), Poe's Tales of the Grotesque
and Arabesque (1840), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
(1818), and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Die Elixiere
des Teufels (1815), would later attract 20th-century
psychoanalysts and supply the images for 20th-
and 21st-century horror films, love romances,
fantasy novels, role-playing computer games,
and the surrealists.
The historical romance was also important
at this time. But, while earlier writers of
these romances paid little attention to historical
reality, Walter Scott's historical novel Waverley
(1814) broke with this tradition, and he invented
"the true historical novel". At the same time
he was influenced by gothic romance, and had
collaborated in 1801 with 'Monk' Lewis on
Tales of Wonder. With his Waverley novels
Scott "hoped to do for the Scottish border"
what Goethe and other German poets "had done
for the Middle Ages, "and make its past live
again in modern romance". Scott's novels "are
in the mode he himself defined as romance,
'the interest of which turns upon marvelous
and uncommon incidents'". He used his imagination
to re-evaluate history by rendering things,
incidents and protagonists in the way only
the novelist could do. His work remained historical
fiction, yet it questioned existing historical
perceptions. The use of historical research
was an important tool: Scott, the novelist,
resorted to documentary sources as any historian
would have done, but as a romantic he gave
his subject a deeper imaginative and emotional
significance. By combining research with "marvelous
and uncommon incidents", Scott attracted a
far wider market than any historian could,
and was the most famous novelist of his generation,
throughout Europe.
==== The Victorian period: 1837–1901 ====
In the 19th century the relationship between
authors, publishers, and readers, changed.
Authors originally had only received payment
for their manuscript, however, changes in
copyright laws, which began in 18th and continued
into 19th century promised royalties on all
future editions. Another change in the 19th
century was that novelists began to read their
works in theaters, halls, and bookshops. Also
during the nineteenth century the market for
popular fiction grew, and competed with works
of literature. New institutions like the circulating
library created a new market with a mass reading
public.Another difference was that novels
began to deal with more difficult subjects,
including current political and social issues,
that were being discussed in newspapers and
magazines. The idea of social responsibility
became a key subject, whether of the citizen,
or of the artist, with the theoretical debate
concentrating on questions around the moral
soundness of the modern novel. Questions about
artistic integrity, as well as aesthetics,
including, for example. the idea of "art for
art's sake", proposed by writers like Oscar
Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were
also important.Major British writers such
as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were influenced
by the romance genre tradition of the novel,
which had been revitalized during the Romantic
period. The Brontë sisters were notable mid-19th-century
authors in this tradition, with Anne Brontë's
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
Publishing at the very end of the 19th century,
Joseph Conrad has been called "a supreme 'romancer.'"
In America "the romance ... proved to be a
serious, flexible, and successful medium for
the exploration of philosophical ideas and
attitudes." Notable examples include Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick.A number of European
novelists were similarly influenced influenced
during this period by the earlier romance
tradition, along with the Romanticism, including
Victor Hugo, with novels like The Hunchback
of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862),
and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov with A Hero
of Our Time (1840).
Many 19th-century authors dealt with significant
social matters. Émile Zola's novels depicted
the world of the working classes, which Marx
and Engels's non-fiction explores. In the
United States slavery and racism became topics
of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852),
which dramatizes topics that had previously
been discussed mainly in the abstract. Charles
Dickens' novels led his readers into contemporary
workhouses, and provided first-hand accounts
of child labor. The treatment of the subject
of war changed with Leo Tolstoy's War and
Peace (1868/69), where he questions the facts
provided by historians. Similarly the treatment
of crime is very different in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment (1866), where the point
of view is that of a criminal. Women authors
had dominated fiction from the 1640s into
the early 18th century, but few before George
Eliot so openly questioned the role, education,
and status of women in society, as she did.
As the novel became a platform of modern debate,
national literatures were developed that link
the present with the past in the form of the
historical novel. Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi
Sposi (1827) did this for Italy, while novelists
in Russia and the surrounding Slavonic countries,
as well as Scandinavia, did likewise.
Along with this new appreciation of history,
the future also became a topic for fiction.
This had been done earlier in works like Samuel
Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century
(1733) and Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826),
a work whose plot culminated in the catastrophic
last days of a mankind extinguished by the
plague. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
(1887) and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895)
were concerned with technological and biological
developments. Industrialization, Darwin's
theory of evolution and Marx's theory of class
divisions shaped these works and turned historical
processes into a subject of wide debate. Bellamy's
Looking Backward became the second best-selling
book of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Such works led
to the development of a whole genre of popular
science fiction as the 20th century approached.
=== The 20th century and later ===
==== 
Modernism and post-modernism ====
James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) had a major influence
on modern novelists, in the way that it replaced
the 18th- and 19th-century narrator with a
text that attempted to record inner thoughts,
or a "stream of consciousness". This term
was first used by William James in 1890 and,
along with the related term interior monologue,
is used by modernists like Dorothy Richardson,
Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William
Faulkner. Also in the 1920s expressionist
Alfred Döblin went in a different direction
with Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), where interspersed
non-fictional text fragments exist alongside
the fictional material to create another new
form of realism, which differs from that of
stream-of-consciousness.
Later works like Samuel Beckett's trilogy
Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The
Unnamable (1953), as well as Julio Cortázar's
Rayuela (1963) and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow (1973) all make use of the stream-of-consciousness
technique. On the other hand, Robert Coover
is an example of those authors who, in the
1960s, fragmented their stories and challenged
time and sequentiality as fundamental structural
concepts.
The 20th century novels deals with a wide
range of subject matter. Erich Maria Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) focusses
on young German's experiences of World War
I. The Jazz Age is explored by American F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and the Great Depression
by fellow American John Steinbeck. The rise
of totalitarian states is the subject of British
writer George Orwell. France's existentialism
is the subject of French writers Jean-Paul
Sartre's Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus' The
Stranger (1942). The counterculture of the
1960s led to revived interest in Hermann Hesse's
Steppenwolf (1927), and produced such iconic
works of its own like Ken Kesey's One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow. Novelist have also been
interested in the subject of racial and gender
identity in recent decades. Jesse Kavadlo
of Maryville University of St. Louis has described
Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) as "a
closeted feminist critique". Virginia Woolf,
Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Elfriede
Jelinek were feminist voices during this period.
Furthermore, the major political and military
confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries
have also influenced novelists. The events
of World War II, from a German perspective,
are dealt with by Günter Grass' The Tin Drum
(1959) and an American by Joseph Heller's
Catch-22 (1961). The subsequent Cold War influenced
popular spy novels. Latin American self-awareness
in the wake of the (failing) left revolutions
of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a "Latin
American Boom", linked to with the names of
novelists Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa,
Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez,
along with the invention of a special brand
of postmodern magic realism.
Another major 20th-century social events,
the so-called sexual revolution is reflected
in the modern novel. D.H. Lawrence's Lady
Chatterley's Lover had to be published in
Italy in 1928; British censorship lifted its
ban as late as 1960. Henry Miller's Tropic
of Cancer (1934) created the comparable US
scandal. Transgressive fiction from Vladimir
Nabokov's Lolita (1955) to Michel Houellebecq's
Les Particules élémentaires (1998) entered
a literary field that eventually led to more
pornographic works such as Anne Desclos' Story
of O (1954) to Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus
(1978).
In the second half of the 20th century, Postmodern
authors subverted serious debate with playfulness,
claiming that art could never be original,
that it always plays with existing materials.
The idea that language is self-referential
was already an accepted truth in the world
of pulp fiction. A postmodernist re-reads
popular literature as an essential cultural
production. Novels from Thomas Pynchon's The
Crying of Lot 49 (1966), to Umberto Eco's
The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault's
Pendulum (1989) made use of intertextual references.
=== Genre fiction ===
See also: Thriller, Westerns and Speculative
fiction
While the reader of so-called serious literature
will follow public discussions of novels,
popular fiction production employs more direct
and short-term marketing strategies by openly
declarating of the work's genre. Popular novels
are based entirely on the expectations for
the particular genre, and this includes the
creation of a series of novels with an identifiable
brand name. e.g. the Sherlock Holmes series
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Popular literature holds a larger market share.
Romance fiction had an estimated $1.375 billion
share in the US book market in 2007. Inspirational
literature/religious literature followed with
$819 million, science fiction/fantasy with
$700 million, mystery with $650 million and
then classic literary fiction with $466 million.
Genre literature might be seen as the successor
of the early modern chapbook. Both fields
share a focus on readers who are in search
of accessible reading satisfaction. The 20th-century
love romance is a successor of the novels
Madeleine de Scudéry, Marie de La Fayette,
Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood wrote from the
1640s into the 1740s. The modern adventure
novel goes back to Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe (1719) and its immediate successors.
Modern pornography has no precedent in the
chapbook market but originates in libertine
and hedonistic belles lettres, of works like
John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1749) and similar
eighteenth century novels. Ian Fleming's James
Bond is a descendant of the anonymous yet
extremely sophisticated and stylish narrator
who mixed his love affairs with his political
missions in La Guerre d'Espagne (1707). Marion
Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon is influenced
by Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature,
including its 19th-century successors. Modern
horror fiction also has no precedent on the
market of chapbooks but goes back to the elitist
market of early-19th-century Romantic literature.
Modern popular science fiction has an even
shorter history, from the 1860s.
The authors of popular fiction tend to advertise
that they have exploited a controversial topic
and this is a major difference between them
and so-called elitist literature. Dan Brown,
for example, discusses, on his website, the
question whether his Da Vinci Code is an anti-Christian
novel. And because authors of popular fiction
have a fan community to serve, they can risk
offending literary critic. However, the boundaries
between popular and serious literature have
blurred in recent years, with postmodernism
and poststructuralism, as well as by adaptation
of popular literary classics by the film and
television industries.
Crime became a major subject of 20th and 21st
century genre novelists and crime fiction
reflects the realities of modern industrialized
societies. Crime is both a personal and public
subject: criminals each have their personal
motivations; detectives, see their moral codes
challenged. Patricia Highsmith's thrillers
became a medium of new psychological explorations.
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1985–1986)
is an example of experimental postmodernist
literature based on this genre.
Fantasy is another major area of commercial
fiction, and a major example is J. R. R. Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings (1954/55), a work originally
written for young readers that became a major
cultural artefact. Tolkien in fact revived
the tradition of European epic literature
in the tradition of Beowulf, the North Germanic
Edda and the Arthurian Cycles.
Science fiction, is another important type
of genre fiction and it has developed in a
variety of ways, ranging from the early, technological
adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable
in the 1860s, to Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World (1932) about Western consumerism and
technology. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949) deals with totalitarianism and surveillance,
among other matters, while Stanisław Lem,
Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke produced
modern classics which focus on the interaction
between humans and machines. The surreal novels
of Philip K Dick such as The Three Stigmata
of Palmer Eldritch explore the nature of reality,
reflecting the widespread recreational experimentation
with drugs and cold-war paranoia of the 60's
and 70's. Writers such as Ursula le Guin and
Margaret Atwood explore feminist and broader
social issues in their works. William Gibson,
author of the cult classic Neuromancer (1984),
is one of a new wave of authors who explore
post-apocalyptic fantasies and virtual reality.
== See also
