The Origin
of 'Novel' and its Kinds - I
Samuel Richardson's Pamela and
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy; Jane Austen's Emma
and Virginia Woolf's Orlando; Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers and Henry James'
The Wings of the Dove; Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
and Franz Kafka's The Trial; Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also
Rises and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake; Doris Lessing's The
Golden Notebook and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita are some examples for novels.
"The novel is
an extended narrative. The novel is
distinguished from the short story and from the work of middle length
called the novelette; its magnitude permits a greater variety of
characters, greater complication of plot (or plots), ampler development of
milieu, and more sustained exploration of character and motives than do the
shorter, more concentrated modes."
As a narrative written in prose, the novel is
distinguished from the long narratives in verse by Chaucer and Milton. The
English name for the form, is derived from the Italian novella
(literally, "a little new thing"), which was a ‘short tale’ in prose.
Long narrative romances in prose were written by Greek writers as early as the
second and third centuries A.D. d Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia was
Elizabethan continuation of the pastoral romance of the ancient Greeks.
Picaresque
Narrative is the predecessor of the later
form of novel. It appeared in Spain in the sixteenth century. "Picaro" is Spanish word for
"rogue' and a typical story concerns the escapades of an indifferent
rascal who lives by his wits. Picaresque fiction is realistic in manner,
episodic in structure and often satiric in aim. The first, and very lively
English example was Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller
(1594). We recognize the survival of the picaresque type in many later novels
such as Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Thomas
Mann's Felix Krull (1954), and Saul Bellow's The Adventures
of Augie March (1953). Cervantes' great quasi-picaresque narrative Don
Quixote (1605) was the single most important progenitor of the modern
novel.
In 1719
Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe and in 1722, Moll
Flanders. Both of these are still picaresque in type, in the sense that
their structure is episodic rather than in the organized form of a plot; while
Moll is herself a colorful female version of the old picaro. Defoe is often credited with writing the
first novel of incident. The credit for having written the first
English novel of character, or "psychological novel," is
almost unanimously given to Samuel Richardson for his Pamela; or,
Virtue Rewarded.
Pamela
is an epistolary novel;
that is, the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters. Later
novelists have preferred alternative devices for limiting the narrative point
of view to one or another single character, but the epistolary technique is
still occasionally revived.
(Source: M.H.Abrams: A Glossary of Literary Terms)
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