Novel. The term "novel" is now applied to a great variety of writings that have in common only the attribute of being extended works of fiction written in prose. As 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
of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton which, beginning
with the eighteenth century, the novel has increasingly supplanted. Within
these limits the novel includes such diverse works as 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.
The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which is
derived from the medieval term, the romance. The English name for the form,
on the other hand, is derived from the Italian novella (literally, "a little new
thing"), which was a short tale in prose. In fourteenth-century Italy there was
a vogue for collections of such tales, some serious and some scandalous; the
best known of these collections is Boccaccio's Decameron, which is still available
in English translation at any well-stocked bookstore. Currently the term
"novella" (or in the German form, Novelle) is often used as an equivalent for
novelette: a prose fiction of middle length, such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness or Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. (See under short story.)
Long narrative romances in prose were written by Greek writers as early
as the second and third centuries A.D. Typically they dealt with separated
lovers who, after perilous adventures and hairbreadth escapes, are happily reunited
at the end. The best known of these Greek romances, influential in
later European literature, were the Aethiopica by Heliodorus and the charming
pastoral narrative Daphnis and Chloe by Longus. Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde
(the model for Shakespeare's As You Like It) and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia
were Elizabethan continuations of the pastoral romance of the ancient
Greeks. (See romance and pastoral.)
Another important predecessor of the later novel was the picaresque narrative,
which emerged in sixteenth-century Spain, although the most popular
instance, Gil Bias (1715), was written by the Frenchman Le Sage. "Picaro" is Spanish for "rogue/' and a typical story concerns the escapades of an insouciant
rascal who lives by his wits and shows little if any alteration of character
through the long succession of his adventures. Picaresque fiction is realistic in
manner, episodic in structure (that is, composed of a sequence of events held
together largely because they happened to one person), 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 ofAugie
March (1953). The development of the novel owes much to prose works
which, like the picaresque story, were written to deflate romantic or idealized
fictional forms. Cervantes' great quasi-picaresque narrative Don Quixote
(1605) was the single most important progenitor of the modern novel; in it,
an engaging madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric romance in
the everyday world is used to explore the relations of illusion and reality in
human life.
After these precedents and many others—including the seventeenthcentury
character (a brief sketch of a typical personality or way of life) and
Madame de La Fayette's psychologically complex study of character, La
Princesse de Cleves (1678)—what is recognizably the novel as we now think of
it appeared in England in the early eighteenth century. 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—"twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own
Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia," as
the title page resoundingly informs us. But Robinson Crusoe is given an enforced
unity of action by its focus on the problem of surviving on an uninhabited
island, and both stories present so convincing a central character, set
in so solid and detailedly realized a world, that 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 (1740). Pamela is the story of a sentimental but
shrewd young woman who, by prudently safeguarding her beleaguered
chastity, succeeds in becoming the wife of a wild young gentleman instead of
his debauched servant girl. The distinction between the novel of incident and
the novel of character cannot be drawn sharply; but in the novel of incident
the greater interest is in what the protagonist will do next and on how the
story will turn out; in the novel of character, it is on the protagonist's motives
for what he or she does, and on how the protagonist as a person will turn out.
On twentieth-century developments in the novel of character see Leon Edel,
The Modem Psychological Novel (rev., 1965).
Pamela, like its greater and tragic successor, Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48), 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—for example, in Mark Harris' hilarious novel Wake Up, Stupid (1959) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). See Linda Kauffman, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992).
Novels may have any kind of plot form—tragic, comic, satiric, or romantic.
A common distinction—which was described by Hawthorne, in his preface
to The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and elsewhere, and has been adopted
and expanded by a number of recent critics—is that between two basic types of
prose fiction: the realistic novel (which is the novel proper) and the romance.
The realistic novel is characterized as the fictional attempt to give the effect of
realism, by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are
rooted in a social class, operate in a developed social structure, interact with
many other characters, and undergo plausible, everyday modes of experience.
This novelistic mode, rooted in such eighteenth-century writers as Defoe
and Fielding, achieved a high development in the master-novelists of the
nineteenth century, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope,
William Dean Howells, and Henry James in England and America; Stendhal,
George Sand, Balzac, and Flaubert in France; and Turgenev and Tolstoy in Russia.
If, as in the writings of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and John P. Marquand,
a realistic novel focuses on the customs, conversation, and ways of
thinking and valuing of a particular social class, it is often called a novel of
manners. 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;
and the nonrealistic and occasionally melodramatic events are claimed by
some critics to project in symbolic form the primal desires, hopes, and terrors
in the depths of the human mind, and to be therefore analogous to the materials
of dream, myth, ritual, and folklore. Examples of romance novels are 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), distinguishes a special type of romance, "the adventure novel,"
which deals with masculine adventures in the newly colonized non-European
world. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is an early prototype; some later instances
are H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1886), Robert Louis
Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), and Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901).
Refer to Deborah Ross, The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, Women's Contribution to the Novel (1991). On the realistic novel in the nineteenth century see Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (1963); loan Williams, The Realist Novel in England (1975); G. J. Becker, Master European Realists (1982). On the prose romance in America, see Richard Chase,
The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957); Northrop Frye, "The Mythos of
Summer: Romance," in Anatomy of Criticism (1957); Joel Porte, The Romance in
America (1969); Michael D. Bell, The Development of American Romance (1980);
and for a skeptical view of the usual division between novel and romance,
Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum
America (1984).
Other often identified subclasses of the novel are based on differences in
subject matter, emphasis, and artistic purpose:
Bildungsroman and Erziehungsroman are German terms signifying
"novel of formation" or "novel of education." The subject of these novels is
the development of the protagonist's mind and character, in the passage from
childhood through varied experiences—and often through a spiritual crisis—
into maturity, which usually involves recognition of one's identity and role in
the world. The mode was begun by K. P. Moritz's Anton Reiser (1785-90) and
Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship (1795-96); it includes Charlotte
Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), Charles
Dickens' Great Expectations (1861), Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
(1915), and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). An important subtype
of the Bildungsroman is the Künstlerroman ("artist-novel"), which represents
the growth of a novelist or other artist from childhood into the stage
of maturity that signalizes the recognition of the protagonist's artistic destiny
and mastery of an artistic craft. Instances of this type include some major
twentieth-century novels: Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past
(1913-27), James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15),
Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger (1903) and Dr. Faustus (1947), and André Gide's
The Counterfeiters (1926). See Susanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English
Kinsmen (1930); Lionel Trilling, "The Princess Casamassima," in The Liberal
Imagination (1950); Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Saaed Founts: The Artistas
Hero in Fiction (1964); Jerome H. Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman
from Dickens to Golding (1974); Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from
Wieland to Hesse (1978). In Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and
the Novel of Development (1993), Susan Fraiman analyzes novels about "growing
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