Motivation in Second language Learning : Kinds and Factors

The Origin of Novel and its Kinds - II

Novels may have any kind of plot form—tragic, comic, satiric, or romantic. But broadly they are of two kinds: the realistic novel and the romance.

The realistic novel is a fictional attempt to give the effect of realism, by representing complex characters with mixed motives . These characters are rooted in a social class and operate in a developed social structure. They interact with many other characters, and undergo plausible, everyday modes of experience. Defoe, Fielding, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Dean Howells, and Henry James belong to this group. A realistic novel focuses on the customs, conversation, and ways of thinking and valuing of a particular social class and it is often called a novel of manners. Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and John P. Marquand produced this kind of novel.

The prose romance, on the other hand, has as precursors the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages and the Gothic novel of the later eighteenth century. It usually deploys characters who are sharply discriminated as heroes or villains, masters or victims.  Its protagonist is often solitary, and relatively isolated from a social context. It tends to be set in the historical past, and the atmosphere is such as to suspend the reader's expectations based on everyday experience. The plot of the prose romance emphasizes adventure, and is frequently cast in the form of the quest for an ideal, or the pursuit of an enemy. Walter Scott's Rob Roy (1817), Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers (1844-45), Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), and an important line of American narratives which extends from Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville to recent writings of William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Martin Green, in Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1979) are some examples.

The social novel emphasizes the influence of the social and economic conditions of an era on shaping characters and determining events; often it also embodies an implicit or explicit thesis recommending political and social reform. Examples of social novels are Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Nadine Gordimer's Burger’s Daughter (1979). Some realistic novels make use of events and personages from the historical past to add interest and picturesqueness to the narrative.

The historical novel, however, began in the nineteenth century with Sir Walter Scott. The historical novel not only takes its setting and some characters and events from history, but makes the historical events and issues crucial for the central characters and narrative. Some of the greatest historical novels also use the protagonists and actions to reveal what the author regards as the deep forces that impel the historical process. Examples of historical novels are Scott's Ivanhoe (1819), set in the period of Norman domination of the Saxons at the time of Richard I; Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859), in Paris and London during the French Revolution; George Eliot's Romola (1863), in Florence during the Renaissance; Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), during Napoleon's invasion of Russia; and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), in Georgia during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

One twentieth-century variant of the historical novel is known as documentary fiction, which incorporates not only historical characters and events, but also reports of everyday events in contemporary newspapers: John Dos Passos, USA (1938); E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975) and Billy Bathgate (1989).

The regional novel emphasizes the setting, speech, and social structure and customs of a particular locality, not merely as local color, but as important conditions affecting the temperament of the characters and their ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting. Instances of such localities are "Wessex" in Thomas Hardy's novels, and "Yoknapatawpha County," Mississippi, in Faulkner's. Stella Gibbons wrote a witty parody of the regional novel in Cold Comfort Farm (1936).

Beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century, the novel displaced all other literary forms in popularity. The novelistic art has received the devoted attention of some of the greatest masters of modern literature— Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Mann, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. The post modern novel experimented with ideas like involuted novel, anti-novel and magic realism.

(M.H.Abrams)