Novel

A novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story.

While Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel came into being in the early 18th century, the genre has also been described as "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with historical roots in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, and in the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era; the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.

While a more precise definition of the genre is difficult, the main elements that critics discuss are: how the narrative, and especially the plot, is constructed; the themes, settings, and characterization; how language is used; and the way that plot, character, and setting relate to reality.

The romance is a related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", whereas in the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society". However, many 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". Romance, as defined here, should not be confused with 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."

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, and 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 have preserved the term "romance" (as in French, Dutch, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian "roman"; German "Roman"; Portuguese "romance" and Italian "romanzo") for extended narratives.

A fictional narrative

Fictionality 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.

However, up until the 1750s historians were the main critics of the novel and they emphasised its lack of veracity and therefore serious worth, and criticised it for being merely entertainment. Then in the second half of the 18th-century criticism evolved and with Romanticism came the idea that works of fiction could be art.

Literary prose

While 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 â€" 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.

However, in the 15th century, following the invention of printing, prose began to dominate European fiction. This immediately led to the development of a special elevated prose style modelled on Greek and Roman histories, and the traditions of verse narrative. The development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that aimed at creating works that readers would actually identify, and appreciate, as fiction rather than history.

At the beginning of the 16th century, printing had created a special demand for books that were neither simply published for the nonâ€"academic audience nor explicitly scientific literature, but belles-lettres. This included modern history and science in the vernacular, personal memoirs, contemporary political scandal, fiction and poetry. However, prose fiction was soon far more popular than verse, rhetoric and science. Fictional prose, though aiming for stylistic elegance, was closer to everyday language, to personal letters, to the art of "gallant" conversation, and to the personal memoir and travelogue. Pierre Daniel Huet summarised the stylistic ambition of fictional prose accordingly in 1670: "It must be compos'd with Art and Elegance, lest it should appear to be a rude undigested Mass, without Order or Beauty."

By the 18th century, however, English authors began to criticize the French ideals of belles lettres elegance, and a less aristocratic prose style became the ideal for them in the 1740s. When, in the 1760s, it became the norm for the author to open his or her novel with a statement of the work's fictionality, the prose became even more informal.

Media: paper and print

The development of printing technology, along with the availability of paper, changed the situation for prose fiction. Paper allowed the production of cheap books that would not necessarily be read twice, and which could be bought exclusively for private diversion. The new medium produced the modern novel in Europe in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. The formats duodecimo and octavo, or small quarto in the case of chapbooks, immediately created books which could be read privately at home, or in public, without the support of a table. To read novels in coffee houses, or on journeys, became part of early modern reading culture.

Content: intimate experience

Both 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. The late medieval commercial manuscript production created a market of private books, but it still required the customer to contact the professional copyist with the book a person wanted to have copied, a situation that restricted the development of a more private reading experience. The invention of the printing press, in the 15th century, however, totally altered the situation.

A new world of Individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct" and "gallantry" spread with novels and the associated prose-romance. Love also became a major subject for novels. Pierre Huet, in an early definition of the novel, or romance, noted: "I call them Fictions, to discriminate them from True Histories; and I add, of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the Principal Subject of Romance." The reader is invited to personally identify emotionally with a novel's characters, whereas historians aim ideally at objectivity.

Length

The novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the novella, short story, and flash fiction. 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 length of a novel can still be important because most literary awards use length as a criterion in the ranking system. The Booker Prize in 2007 created a serious debate with its short-listing of Ian McEwan's 166-page work On Chesil Beach, with some critics stating that McEwan had at best written a novella.

The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that a novel should encompass the "totality of life."

Early forerunners

Although early forms of the novel are to be found in a number of places, including classical Rome, 10thâ€" 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 Sanskrit such as the 6thâ€" or 7th-century DaÅ›akumāracarita by Daṇḍin, and in the 7th-century Kadambari by Banabhatta, the 11th-century Japanese Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, 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 in Chinese in the 14th-century 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 AD) China led to the evolution of oral storytelling into consciously fictional novels by the Ming dynasty (1368â€"1644 AD). Parallel European developments did not occur for centuries, and awaited the time when the availability of paper 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 (1300â€"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.750â€"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. Classical Greek epics like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (9th or 8th century BC), and those of Ancient Rome, such as Virgil's Aeneid (29â€"19 BC), were re-discovered by Western scholars in the Middle Ages. 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 famous Greek novel, Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century A.D.).

Medieval period 1100â€"1500

Romances

The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted in the tradition of medieval "romances". Even today, most European languages make that clear by using the word roman roughly the way that English uses the word novel, which claims roots in the Italian novella. Yet, epic length or the focus on a central hero giving the work its name (as in Robinson Crusoe or Oliver Twist) are features derived from the tradition of "romances". The early modern novel had preferred titles that focused on curious examples of modern life, not on heroes.

The word roman or romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of the 13th century, as in the Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), famous today in English through Geoffrey Chaucer's late-14th-century translation. The term linked fictions back to the histories that had appeared in the Romance language of 11th- and 12th-century southern France. The central subject matter was initially derived from Roman and Greek historians. Works of the Chanson de geste tradition revived the memory of ancient Thebes, Dido and Aeneas, and Alexander the Great. German and Dutch adaptations of the famous histories appeared in the late 12th century and early 13th century. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1380â€"87) is a late example of this European fashion.

The subject matter which was to become the central theme of the genre in the 16th and 17th centuries was initially a branch of a broader genre. Arthurian histories became a fashion in the late 12th century, thanks to their ability to glorify the northern European feudal system as an independent cultural achievement. The works of Chrétien de Troyes set an example, in that his plot construction subjected the northern European epic traditions to ancient Greek aesthetics. The typical Arthurian romance would focus on a single hero and lead him into a double course of episodes in which he would prove both his prowess as an independent knight and his readiness to function as a perfect courtier under King Arthur. The model invited religious redefinitions with the quest and the adventure as basic plot elements: the quest was a mission the knight would accept as his personal task and problem. Adventures (from Latin advenire "coming towards you") were tests sent by God to the knight on the journey, whose course he (the knight) would no longer try to control. The plot framework survived into the world of modern Hollywood movies which still unite, separate and reunite lovers in the course of adventures designed to prove their love and value. Variations kept the genre alive: unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1380). Satirical parodies of knight errantry (and contemporary politics) appeared with works such as Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring (c. 1410).

The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century. The Prose Lancelot or Vulgate Cycle includes passages of that period. The collection indirectly lead to Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur compilation of the early 1470s.

Certain factors made prose increasingly attractive: it linked the popular plots to the field of serious histories traditionally composed in prose (compilations such as Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur claimed to collect historical sources for the sole purpose of instruction and national edification). Prose had an additional advantage for translation, because verse could only be translated by skilled poets.

Prose became the medium of the urban commercial book market in the 15th century. Monasteries sold edifying collections of saints' and virgins' lives composed in prose. The customers were mostly women (the interiors of many of the 14th- and 15th-century paintings of the Annunciation show how far books had spread into the urban households that painters usually depicted as the Blessed Virgin's bourgeois environment.) Prose became in this environment the medium of silent and private reading. It spread with the commercial book market that began to provide such reading materials even before the arrival of the first commercial printed histories in the 1470s.

The novella

The term novel refers back to the production of short stories that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, little funny stories designed to make a point in a conversation, 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 such poetic cycles as Boccaccio's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1386â€"1400).

The early modern genre conflict between "novels" and "romances" can be traced back to the 14th-century cycles. The standard scheme of stories the author claimed to have heard in a round of narrators promised variety of subject matter and it led to clashes of genres. Short romances appeared within the frame tales side by side with stories of the rival lower genres such as the fabliaux. Individual story tellers would openly defend their tastes in a debate that grew into a metafictional consideration.

The cycles themselves showed advantages over the production of rival extended epic-length romances. Romances presupposed a consensus in questions of style and heroism. The cycles shifted the problem of how fictions were to be justified onto the level of the individual storytellers: onto a level the author, Chaucer or Boccaccio, would see as out of his control. The narrators had, so Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales offered these stories to make certain points in a lively conversation he had only chronicled. They attacked each other if they felt the stories of their opponents had missed their points. A competition among the genres developed. If one believes the medieval collections, differing tastes of people with different social statuses were decisive; the different professions fought a battle over precedent with satirical plots designed to ridicule individuals of the opposing trades. A cycle bound rival stories together and it offered the easiest way to keep a critical distance. The pluralistic discourse created here eventually developed into the 17th- and 18th-century debate of fiction and its genres.

Much of this original conception of the genre is still alive whenever a short joke is told to make a certain humorous point in everyday conversation. The longer exploits left the sphere of oral traditions with the arrival of the printing press. The book eventually replaced the story teller and introduced the preface and the dedication as the paratexts in which the authors would continue the metafictional debate over the advantages of genres and the reasons why one published and read fictional stories.

Renaissance period: 1500-1700

The modern distinction between history and fiction did not exist at this time 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

The invention of printing led to the commercialization of histories, whether allegedly true or works of fiction. Romances had circulated, prior to this time, in lavishly ornamented manuscripts to be read to an audience. The invention of the printed book created a comparatively inexpensive alternative for the special purpose of silent reading. 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.

Literacy spread among the urban populations of Europe due to a number of factors: Women of wealthier households had learned to read in the 14th and 15th centuries and had become consumers of works of religious devotion; secondly the Protestant Reformation enkindled propaganda and press wars that lasted into the 18th century; finally Broadsheets and newspapers became the new media of public information.

Paralleling this expansion in reading, writing skills spread among apprentices and women of the middle classes. Business owners were forced to adopt methods of written book-keeping and accounting. The personal letter became a favourite medium of communication among better-off 17th-century men and women.

Cheap printed histories were, in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially popular among apprentices and younger urban readers of both sexes. Norris' and Bettesworth's 1719 edition of The Seven Famous Champions of Christendom ended with a look at the entire spectrum of books the publishers would provide in their shops on London Bridge:

At the afore-mentioned Place, all Country Chapmen may be furnished with all Sorts of Bibles, Commonprayers, Testaments, Psalters, Primers and Horn-books; Likewise all Sorts of three Sheets Histories, Penny Histories, and Sermons; and Choice of new and old Ballads, at reasonable Rates.

This new market for books was disregarded by scholars. The texts were offered with promises of great erudition to an audience that did not know the difference between erudition and the misleading advertisement. The subject matter was extremely conservative, and the bestsellers of this marketâ€"books such as Till Eulenspiegel, The Seven Wise Masters, Don Belianis of Greece, Dr. Faustus, The London Prentice, and Sir John Mandeville's Voyagesâ€"went through innumerable editions between 1500 and 1800. People bought these books because everyone had heard of them.

The design of these chapbooks deteriorated and texts were copied with little editing. Standard woodcut illustrations were repeated, often even within a single book, wherever the plot allowed such repetition. The illustrations began to show peculiar style mixes as the printer's stocks grew: early-18th-century editions of 16th-century titles would mix woodcuts of 16th-century knights in armor with equally crude depictions of 18th-century courtiers wearing wigs.

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 multiâ€"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) and a mutilated editions of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), which infuriated the author with their claim to offer the entire plot without the tedious reflections for but half the price.

The cheap abridgments openly addressed an audience that did not have the money to buy books with engravings and fine print. The prefaces of the abridgements promised shorter sentences, more action and less reflection, at half the cost. The gradual differentiation between fact and fiction that affected the market of the belles lettres in the 17th and 18th centuries barely touched this chapbook market.

Romances

Heroic romances

By the 1550s there existed a section of literature (scientific books) addressing the academic audience and a second market of books for the wider audience. The popular second market developed its own differentiation of class and style. While the lowest strata of chapbooks created an extremely conservative market, its antagonist, the elegant "belles lettres", showed a particular design aiming at educated readers of both sexes, though not necessarily at academics. The very term "belles lettres" spoke of the ambition to leave the field of low books and to reach the realm of the sciences, "literature", "les lettres". Polite literature, galante Wissenschaften (that is sciences addressing both sexes and all readers of taste) were the English and German terminological equivalents. The use of French loan words (belles lettres) marked the international aspect of the development. The new market segment comprised poetry, memoirs, modern politics, books of fashion, journals, and the like. Autobiographical memoirs, personal journals and prose fiction set the trend in the modern field as the genres that authors could most freely use for experiments of style and personal expression.

The evolution of prose fiction needed the elegant market, a market of changing styles and fashions, and it found its central critical debate with the publication of the Amadis de Gaula in the 1530s. Two questions moved into the centre of the debate as Spanish, French and German translations and imitations flooded the European market. The first was a question of style and fashion: the Amadis had moved back into the Arthurian Middle Ages, into a world of quests, knights and adventures, though it had turned its princes and princesses into paragons of style and elegance. Was this what one had to expect of modern prose fiction? The second problem was connected with the unprecedented public reaction: the Amadis became the object of a widespread reading craze. Could a market of style and distinguished taste allow such a development?

By 1600 the Amadis had become the detested epitome of the modern romance. A search for alternative subject matters had begun. The biographies of Greek and Roman historians became the most important source here. Heliodorus' romances were to be followed in matters of style and composition, while the heroes turned from knights to princes and princesses acting now in ancient courts. The standard plot of adventures gave way to a new plot of love facing intrigues, attacks, rivalry and adversity. A new art of character observation unfolded.

The works that gained the greatest fameâ€"Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée (1607â€"27), John Barclay's Argenis (1625â€"26), Madeleine de Scudéry's Clelie, and Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig's Römischer Octavia (Octavia the Roman, 1679â€"1714)â€"were esteemed both as explorations of the ancient world and as works one would read with an interest in modern life. They present contemporary events set in ancient times and are examples of roman à clef (readers would decipher with the aid of a key who was who within this fictional world). The contemporary fashions of courtly conduct could be found nowhere in such perfection as in these seemingly historical romances, and readers used them as models for their own elegant compliments, letters, and speeches. The genre had much in common with the production of French and Italian operas of the same period. It created a special brand of escapist "Asian" Romances set in the ancient empires of Assyria, Persia, and India. These novels were particularly fashionable among urban female French and German readers of the younger generation, who would dream of sharing the lives and adversities of exotic princesses. The individual European markets reacted differently on these fashions. The fashion had a particularly short life in England where it began in the 1650s only to end in the 1670s, as these romantic plots fell out of fashion.

Satirical romances

Stories of witty cheats were an integral part of the European novella with its tradition of fabliaux. Several collections knitted such stories to individual heroes who developed personal and national features. Germany's Till Eulenspiegel (1510) was the hero of chapbooks in and outside Germany. The Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) represented a transition from a collection of episodes towards the story of the life of a central character, the hero of the work. Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus Teutsch (1666â€"1668) took a further step along this path, as its hero experienced recent world history, in this case the history of the Thirty Years' War that had devastated Germany. Richard Head's The English Rogue (1665) is rooted in this tradition (the English preface mentions the precedents; the German translation that appeared in 1672 sold the book as an English equivalent of the German Simplicissimus). 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 (1532â€"1564). It was rather designed to parody and satirize 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.

Both branches of satirical production seem to have addressed a predominantly male audience (women are despicable victims in works such as Head's The English Rogue). They found the appreciation of critics as long as they revealed the weaknesses of the Amadis. The critics otherwise deplored that the satires could not offer alternatives. Other important works of the tradition are Paul Scarron's Roman Comique (1651â€"57) with its explicit discussions of the market of fictions, the anonymous French Rozelli with its satire on Europe's religions, Alain-René Lesage's Gil Blas (1715â€"1735), Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), and Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist (1773, printed posthumously in 1796).

Dubious and scandalous histories

The entire market of early modern fiction remained part of the wider production of (potentially dubious) histories. A market of literature in the modern sense of the word, a separate market for fiction and poetry, did not exist, because all books were sold under the rubric of "History and politicks" in the early 18th century: pamphlets, memoirs, travel literature, political analysis, serious histories, romances, poetry, and novels.

That fictional histories could share 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 had, however, changed in the 1670s. Paradoxically, the same historians who pleaded for a new era of academic research also pleaded for fiction to stay within the field of histories. The authors who advocated Pyrrhonism, scepticism as a historical discipline, did not demand that fictions change. Instead, they demanded that historians should step from the old project of historical narratives to a new project of critical analysis and discussion of sources. Pierre Bayle exemplified this with all the articles of his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697) and with his statements on the legitimacy of fictions, especially those of the modern political market.

The new novels, romances, and dubious histories, the quasiâ€"historical works of Madame d'Aulnoy, César Vichard de Saint-Réal, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, were, according to the modern advocates of the free press, not only embedded in the field of veritable critical histories: they had an important function to fulfill in that field. In a time when factuality was not a sufficient defence against a libel suit, the romantic layout allowed the publication of histories that could not risk an unambiguous assertion of their truth. The question was not whether one should separate the markets of true and fictional histories from each other, but whether one would be able to establish critical discourses to evaluate all the interesting production.

The literary market-place of the late 17th and early 18th century employed a simple pattern of options of how fictions could both be part of the historical production and reach out into the sphere of true histories. They allowed its authors to claim they had published fiction, not truth, if they ever faced outright allegations of libel.

Prefaces and title pages of 17thâ€" 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 smelledâ€"with its title page alluding to Fénelon's Telemachus (1699/1700)â€"of romance, yet the preface stated that it should most certainly be read a true private history:

IF ever the Story of any private Man's Adventures in the World were worth making Pvblick, and were acceptable when Publish'd, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so.
     The Wonders of this Man's Life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant; the Life of one Man being scarce capable of a greater Variety.
     The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always ap[p]ly them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honor the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will.
    

The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch'd, that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.

Delarivier Manley, under interrogation after the publication of her scandalous Atalantis (1709), replied that she had written a work of sheer romance, a fairy tale located on the famous fictional island. If the ruling Whigs wanted to prove that all her stories matched a scandalous truth of their own actions, they might venture a libel case. The author was released and continued her insinuations with three more volumes of proclaimed romance published during the next two years.

While journalists continued to defend the dubious production (relying on the enlightened audience's ability to read with the necessary grain of skepticism if not with amusement), the defenders of public morals demanded an entirely new organization of the market, one that isolated fiction. This was the market the 18th century was to establish.

Cervantes and the rise of the novel in the 17th century

The term novel was first used by William Painter for his Palace of Pleasure well furnished with pleasaunt Histories and excellent Novelles (1566). Compared with "romances"; "novelles", "novellas" or "novels" ("novel" became the standard term in the 1650s) had to be short. The novel also had to give up all aspirations on grandeur, heroism and the style romantic heroes and their actions required. Romances focused on lonely heroes and their adventures, and novels on incidents that could serve as examples for moral maxims. The titles of romances incorporated the names of their respective heroes and heroines: "Artamene", "Clelie" were the heroes of "heroic romances". "Satirical romances" did the same with their lower class protagonists. The additional "Adventures of" would later emphasize the focus on acts of heroism. In contrast the titles of novels preferred a two-part formula and William Congreve's Incognita or Love and Duty Reconcil'd (1692) was typical of this. The protagonists of novels were actors in a plot, and it was the plot that gave the example and taught the vital lessons. These protagonists could be average human beings without any special signs of grandeur, and not comical, but of the same nature as their readers. Unlike romances, the protagonists were not role models though through their actions still taught lessons.

The rise of the novel as the major 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 a rivalry of 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. A wave of "petites histoires" or "nouvelles historiques" had replaced the old romances. 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. English publishers exploited the novel/romance controversy in the 1670s and 1680s. The word novel began to replace the word romance on title pages in the 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. A reader learned through their actions, not by imitating them. The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip and scandal fuelled the rise of the novel/novella. The authors of modern journalistic gossip spiced their works with short anonymous histories. The 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, thanks to its exotic setting and to its hero's 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), with the typical twoâ€"part title of a novel, which names the heroine and promises its value as an example. Some literary historians date the beginning of the English novel with Richardson's Pamela, rather than Crusoe

The rise of the novel in England: 1700-1770

The idea of the "rise of the novel" in the 18th century is especially associated with Ian Watt's important study The Rise of the Novel (1957). Ian Watt puts forward the idea that novel was a "new form" and associates this with the importance placed on realism by novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. This theory about the novel in the 18th century led to the suggestion that the earlier Romance forms of long prose narrative were either not novels or were at least inferior. However, others including Margaret Anne Doody disagree that the novel originated in the 18th century, arguing that the history of the novel is over two thousands years old, and that in addition the romance tradition continued through the 18th and 19th centuries and still flourishes today. The idea of the rise of the novel in the 18th century is especially associated with English literary criticism, and most other European languages use the same word for an extended narratives: "roman" in French, Dutch, Russian, Croatian, Slovenian, Romanian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian; German "Roman"; Portuguese "romance" and Italian "romanzo". Novelist and critic Albert J. Guerard argues, in The Triumph of the Novel (1976), on behalf of the anti-realist "other great tradition" of the novel that includes Rabelais, Cervantes, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, the "Joyce of Finnegans Wake and the Nabakov of Ada", and sees Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel as contributing to a confusion between fiction and "real life", "by its insistence on 'formal realism' as implicit in the novel form in general". Guerard suggests that Watt's book is most useful "for a study of the eighteenth-century novel", but that it "should not be applied to the genre as a whole".

Given these differences in opinion, what happened in the 18th century can best be described, not as the rise of the novel, but the rise of realism in fiction. Indeed this is what Ian Watt sees as distinguishing the novel from earlier prose narratives.

There are several theories for the growth in the importance of realism in the history of the novel. One is the growth in the number of novels published. English readers of the late 17th and early 18th century were offered a total of some 2,000 to 3,000 titles per year. The numbers had risen dramatically after the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641. The simple title count gives, however, a distorted picture as it equates the sales and influence of theological and political pamphlets with editions of books printed to sell over several years. Statistics of the French and German markets have their own distortions: French numbers are comparatively higher because Dutch publishers printed (or reprinted) French books for the international market. French was Europe's lingua franca and the language of international politics and fashions. Germany's book trade was large but divided between Protestant and Catholic states. The former had arranged for a wider exchange at Leipzig's fairs. The academic production in Latin was comparatively large on the continent due to the importance continental universities had gained as providers of careers.

Literature, as defined now, was of marginal significance in Europe until the end of the 18th century. In the Western markets some 2% to 5% of the total production fell into the categories of poetry and dubious or elegant historical works that were later united under the new heading of "literature". In English, fictional output remained here at 20 to 60 titles per year in the beginning of the 18th century, depending on how one accounts for the wider market of histories. French, German and Dutch statistics are comparable. The eastern and southern European neighbors largely subscribed to the international market.

The Western European output of literature in the modern sense rose significantly in the course of the 18th century; the growth rates stabilised in the 1740s. A change in the public appreciation supported that growth and was reflected by the growing media coverage of new works.

The popularity of novels was a public issue in England during the 18th century. In the media outlets of the times, much was written about the novels, the people who wrote them, and the readers, and often painted them in a negative light. It was believed that novels would have adverse effects on those who read them. Mainly the concern was directed towards women because they were considered to be more susceptible to the messages being conveyed in the novels. The romantic ideals in novels were thought to be particularly detrimental to women causing them to either think or act differently. Although there was a public outcry, society was not greatly changed because of novels and their popularity did not decrease.

Changing cultural status

By around 1700, fiction was no longer a predominantly aristocratic entertainment. The Provençal 12th-century romances and their imitators had already attracted urban connoisseurs who had had the financial means to commission bigger manuscripts in the 14th and 15th centuries. 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. Aristocratic and bourgeois customers sought distinctly French authors to offer the authentic style of conversations in the 1660s.

The situation changed again from 1660s into the 1690s: the French market split. Dutch publishers began to sell works by French authors, published out of the reach of French censors. The publishing houses of The Hague and Amsterdam also pirated the entire Parisian production of fashionable books and thus created a new market of political and scandalous fiction and European fashions. Étienne Roger in Amsterdam published Renneville's L'inquisition Françoise (1715), which was also available in the year of its publication, in English and German. Books of the period boasted of their fame on the international market and of the existence of intermediate translations: "Written originally in Italian and translated from the third edition of the French" is found on title page of Manley's New Atalantis in 1709. A market of European rather than French fashions had arrived in the early 18th century.

By the 1680s the fashionable political European production 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 and used the relative anonymity they enjoyed in far smaller towns like Jena, Halle and Leipzig, to boast of their private amours in fiction. The market of the metropolitan London, the anonymous international market of the Netherlands, the urban markets of Hamburg and Leipzig generated new public spheres. Once private individuals, such as students in university towns and daughters of London's upper class began to use the novel as platform to exhibit their questionable reputations, the public began to call for a reformation of manners.

The reform became the main goal of the second generation of 18th-century novelists who, by the mid-century, openly welcomed the change of climate that had first been promoted in journals such as The Spectator. 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 had appeared as a preface to a novel, Marie de La Fayette's Zayde (1670). Journals devoted to the sciences could not easily switch to devote themselves to belles lettres, and a distinct secondary discourse developed with a wave of entertaining new journals like The Spectator and The Tatler at the beginning of the century. New "literary journals" like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend (1758) added to this production in the middle of the century with the offer of new, scientific reviews of art and fiction. By the 1780s, reviews constituted a new marketing platform for fiction, and authors and publishers recognized it as such. One could write to satisfy the old market or one could address the authors of secondary criticism and gain an audience through their discussions. It would take yet another generation for the novel to arrive in the curricula of school and university education. By the end of the 18th century, the public perception of the place of a particular novel was no longer supplied simply by social status and fashionable geographical provenance, but by critical media attention.

Realism and art

The term "literary realism" is regularly applied to 19th-century fiction, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, whose works were published between 1719 and the 1750s, are regarded as precursors. Research of the last decades has, however, contested views that it was Robinson Crusoe's realism that ended the sway of "French baroque romances". Madeleine de Scudéry's "romances" had not been completely unrealistic. They had left the market nonetheless in the 1670s, defeated by the more realistic "novels" that appeared then. Delarivier Manley's Atalantis was reviewed by a German academic journal in 1713 as work of contemporary public history. Christian Friedrich Hunold fled Hamburg in 1706 after his Satyrischer Roman had depicted the city's elegant urban life as a place of scandal. The French pseudo histories connected today with names such as Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644â€"1712) had become even more radical in their realism and depicted the real world with a detail that rivalled that of historians.

Critics have noted that Defoe's Robinson Crusoe followed Alexander Selkirk's "true" account. and that Crusoe's style of writing used modes of the Protestant spiritual autobiography. However, Defoe's book had other models in the contemporary French pseudo histories. René Auguste Constantin de Renneville's report of his imprisonment in the Bastille had appeared in English, published by Defoe's publisher William Taylor four years before Crusoe. Renneville had promised: "Lives and strange Adventures of several Prisoners", Crusoe risked the focus on himself: "The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe". Robinson Crusoe was serialized, in 1719â€"20, by The Original London Post as a possibly true history.

The 18th century witnessed the rise of increasingly realistic fiction, and with a distinction made between fiction and history. This development reduced the importance of works of disreputable fiction. Fiction became valued as a defender of a higher truth, a truth beyond the flat, factual and historical truth of everyday experience. In the second half of the 18th century theories of aesthetics praised the "imitation of nature" and the artist's almost divine power to create worlds of a deeper significance. The previous conflict between historians and romancers was thus finally resolved: fictions and true histories became two distinct fields that the modern nations needed. Literary journals and literary histories became the privileged media for a new analysis of literary art, the development of which eventually led to a change in how the word literature was applied in the 19th century.

Novel and romance

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 term novel first peaked on the English market in the 1680s, when the novel(la) manifested itself as the alternative to the older "romance". However, the novel lost its attractiveness with ensuing disreputable works. The 1720s saw a second peak of novels with the first editions of classics of the genre and with new large-scale novels in the style of Eliza Haywood. By the mid-18th century it was no longer clear whether the market had not simply developed two linked terms: "romance" as the generic term, and "novel" as a term for a fashionable product that focused on modern life.

The late 18th century brought an answer with the Romantic Movement's readiness to reclaim the word romance, especially with the gothic romance, but the historical novels of Walter Scott also have a strong romance element. Robinson Crusoe became a "novel" in this period appearing now as a work of the new realistic fiction that the 18th century had created. Throughout the 19th century, romances continued to be written in Britain by writers like Emily Brontë, and in America by the dark romantic novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

The acceptance of the novel 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 in the early 18th century. The theologian had not only dared to praise fictions, but he had also explained techniques of theological reading, for the interpretation of fiction, which was a novelty: an individual could read novels and romances to gain insight into foreign and distant cultures as well as into his or her own culture. He noted that Christ had used parables to teach.

The decades around 1700 saw the appearance of new editions of Petronius, Lucian, and Heliodorus of Emesa. The publishers equipped them with prefaces that referred to Huet's treatise. and the canon it had established. Exotic fictions entered the market that gave insight into the Islamic mind. Furthermore 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.

New classics were added to the market and the English, Select Collection of Novels in six volumes (1720â€"22), is a milestone in this development. 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 prose fictions had appeared as "novels" in the 1680s but when reprinted in collections, her works became classics. Fénelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) became a classic within three years after its publication. New authors now entered the market ready to use their own personal names as authors of fiction. Eliza Haywood followed the footsteps of Aphra Behn when, in 1719, she used her name with unprecedented pride.

The reformation of manners

The production of classics allowed the novel to gain a past, prestige and a canon. It called at the same moment for a present production of equal merits. A wave of mid-18th-century works that proclaimed their intent to propagate improved moral values gave critics modern novels they could discuss publicly. Instead of banning novels, the efforts at reformation of manners that had begun in the 1690s now led to their reform.

Female authors and heroines were the first affected by the development. Madame d'Aulnoy and Delarivier Manley became notorious examples of a bygone age of impudence. They had washed their dirty linen in public and used their novels to reinvent themselves and convert their own notoriety into fame. The new female heroines had to show intimacy and sensitivity where their early-18th-century ancestors had been ready to appear in public in order to sanitize their reputations. Intimate confessions and blushes filled the new novels, feelings of guilt, even where suspicions were groundless (early-18th-century heroines had defended their virtues and reputations flamboyantly even where they had gone astray). The modern heroines acted transparently, whereas their early-18th-century counterparts had resorted to secret dealings in endless intrigues. Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678) can be read as the first novel that showed the new behavior.

To become a fashion, if not the standard of modern behavior, the new personality features needed new social environments. Marie de La Fayette's Princesse had fallen into a desperate situation as soon as she risked the outrageous transparency to confess her feelings for another man to her husband. Neither he nor his rival knew how to continue once all this was clear. Mid-18th-century novels created alternatives: protagonists acted transparently, their antagonists saw that as a weakness and exploited and ruined them â€" quite the early-18th-century option â€" but now the moral balance shifted: the open-hearted heroines were no longer victims one could blame for a lack of virtue, but tragic (or melodramatic) figures who had defended a better world. Other novels placed the new transparent heroines into equally new caring environments. Their families resisted temptations to marry them off against their wills, and men around them resisted temptations to seduce them in moments of weakness. The message was that respect and care were to meet open-heartedness in a new age of sensibility. Other novels experimented with surprising acts of an enlightened rationality with which their protagonists could escape deadlock situations far worse than the one Marie de La Fayette's Princesse had produced with her confessions.

The last volume of Antoine François Prévost's Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality, "Manon Lescaut" (1731), aroused a scandal with its melodramatic turns and its unresolved conflicts.

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" focused, by contrast, on the potential victim, a heroine of all the modern virtues vulnerable through her social status and her occupation as servant of the libertine who falls in love with her. Eventually, she shows the power to reform her antagonist.

Christian Fürchtegott Gellert's Life of the Swedish Countess of G** (1747/48) tested the options of rationality. The titular countess had to decide between two husbands after her first, believed to be dead, returned from a Siberian war captivity. Both her husbands, former friends, had to come to terms with the rational problem her situation presented (and did it in a startling mixture of piety and modern philosophy).

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.

The virtuous production inspired a sub- and counterculture of pornographic novels. Greek and Latin authors in modern translations had provided elegant transgressions on the market of the belles lettres for the last century. Satirical novels like Richard Head's English Rogue (1665) had led their heroes through urban brothels, women authors like Aphra Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of the 19th-century femmes fatales â€" without creating a subculture. The market for belles lettres had been openly transgressive as long as it did not find any reflections in other media. The new production beginning with works like John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1748) differed in that it offered almost exact reversals of the plot lines the virtuous production demanded. Fanny Hill is introduced to a life of prostitution, learns to enjoy her part and establishes herself as a free and economically independent individual, in editions one could only expect to buy under the counter.

Openly uncontrollable conflicts arrived in the 1770s with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The titular hero realised how impossible it had become for him to integrate into the new conformist society. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) shows the other extreme, with a group of aristocrats playing games of intrigue and amorality.

The sentimental protagonists of the 1740s had already surprised their readers and aroused a debate whether human nature was correctly depicted with these new novels. They discovered a truth of the heart one had not dared to deal with so far. The radical and lonely characters that appeared in the 1760s and 1770s broke with traditions and eventually needed entirely new back-stories to become plausible. Childhoods and adolescences had to explain why these protagonists should have developed so differently. The concept of character development began to fascinate novelists in the 1760s. Jean Jacques Rousseau's novels focused on such developments in philosophical experiments. The German Bildungsroman offered quasi-biographical explorations and autobiographical self-examinations of the individual and its personal development by the 1790s. A subcategory of the genre focused on the creation of an artist (if not the artist writing the novel). It led to the 19th-century production of novels exploring how modern times form the modern individual.

Philosophical novels

The new 18th-century status of the novel as an object of debate is particularly manifest in special development of philosophical and experimental novels.

Philosophical fiction was not exactly new. Plato's dialogues were embedded in fictional narratives. Utopias had added to this production with works from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602). Works such as these had not been read as novels or romances but as philosophical texts. The 1740s saw new editions of More's work under the title that created the tradition: Utopia: or the happy republic; a philosophical romance (1743).

Voltaire utilised the romance to write philosophy with his Micromegas: a comic romance. Being a severe satire upon the philosophy, ignorance, and 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. Jean-Jacques Rousseau bridged the genres with his less fictional Emile: or, On Education (1762) and his far more romantic Julie, or the New Heloise (1761). It made sense to publish these works as romances or novels, works of fiction, only because prose fiction had become an object of public discussion. The public reception provided by the new market of journals was both freer and wider than the discussion in journals of philosophy would have been. It had become attractive to step into the realm of fiction in order to provide matter for the ongoing debates.

The genre's new understanding of itself resulted in the first metafictional experiment, pressing against its limitations. Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759â€"1767) rejected continuous narration. It expanded the author-reader communication from the preface into the plot itself: Tristram Shandy develops as a conversation between the narrative voice and his audience. Besides narrative experiments, there were visual experiments: a marbled page, a black page to express particular sorrow, a page of little lines to visualize the plot lines of the book one was reading. Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1704) is an early precursor in this fieldâ€"a work that employs visual elements with similar ambitionâ€"yet hardly a text in the tradition of the original novel or its rival the romance.

Romanticism: 1770â€"1837

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. The origin of the gothic romance is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel 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, and that if the Amadis had troubled Don Quixote with curious fantasies, the new romantic tales were worse: they described a nightmare world, and explored sexual fantasies.

The authors of this new type of fiction could be (and were) accused of exploiting all available topics to thrill, arouse, or horrify their audience. These new romantic novelists, at the same time, claimed to explore the entire realm of fictionality. New, 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 psychological 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 ancient romancers most commonly wrote fiction about the remote past with little attention to historical reality. Walter Scott's historical novel Waverley (1814) broke with this earlier tradition of historical romance, and he was "the inventor of the true historical novel". At the same time he was a romantic and was influenced by gothic romance. He had collaborated "with the most famous of the Gothic novelists 'Monk' Lewis" on Tales of Wonder in 1801. 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 artist 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 he became the most famous novelist of his generation, throughout Europe.

The Victorian period: 1837-1901

During the 19th century, romances continued to be written in Britain, and major writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were influenced by the tradition. The Brontë sisters are notable mid-19th-century creators of romance. Their works include Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Publishing first at the very end of the 19th century, Joseph Conrad has been called, "a supreme 'romancer'". In America, it was said, "the romance has proved to be a serious, flexible, and successful medium for the exploration of philosophical ideas and attitudes" into the 20th century, and notable examples are Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Robert Penn Warren's World Enough and Time.

European figures that were influenced by romanticism include Victor Hugo, with novels like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, whose novel A Hero of Our Time (1840) is notable for introducing Superfluous man into the world of literature.

Most 19th-century authors hardly went beyond illustrating and supporting widespread historical views. The more interesting titles won fame by doing what no historian or journalist could do: make the reader experience another life. Émile Zola's novels depicted the world of the working classes, which Marx and Engels wrote about in a non-fictional mode. Slavery in the United States, abolitionism and racism became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which dramatises 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 labour. 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 the production of 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 the novel became the most interesting 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 the Scandinavian countries, did likewise.

With the 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 marked by the idea of long term 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 matter 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 inspired a whole genre of popular science fiction as the 20th century approached.

Literary realism

Literary realism is the trend, beginning with mid nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, toward depictions of contemporary life and society as it was, or is. In the spirit of general "realism," realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation. George Eliot's novel Middlemarch stands as a great milestone in the realist tradition. It is a primary example of nineteenth-century realism's role in the naturalization of the burgeoning capitalist marketplace. William Dean Howells was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His most popular novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, depicts a man who, ironically, falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes.

The creation of national literatures

In the 19th-century an increasing emphasis on the idea of national literature helped shape the future of the novel. The nationalistic analysis of literature had begun in Germany in the late 1720s with a look back on three decades of international European fashions. German authors had embraced French "gallantry" as the essence of elegance and style. However, Germany had gained nothing in the wars the European nations had supported on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire, and the decades of the Nine Years War (1689â€"1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701â€"1714), and the Great Northern War (1700â€"1721) had eventually left the German speaking intellectual elite disenchanted. This help create interest interest in the 1720s in Johann Christoph Gottsched proposed national project to reform the entire market of German poetry. Subsequently Johann Jakob Bodmer, Johann Jakob Breitinger, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing adopted Gottsched's project and created the national discourse that finally gained national importance between 1789 and 1813, when Germany had to define itself politically and culturally as a result of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars.

Another important influence in Germany was Georg Gottfried Gervinus' multi-volume Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (1835-1842), which became the European model for literary history, and in which the new literary historian spoke about the cultural significance of the works he analysed. Unlike Pierre Daniel Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances (1670), which had been a world history of fiction, Gervinus was solely interested in the works of the German nation, whose history and mentality he hoped to better understand, and other nations were of interest only in so far as they had been an intellectual threat.

At the start of the 19th century, the first German states implemented the new nationalistic field of literary studies in their national school curricula. Then three decades later the first histories of German literature appeared with proposals for the canon it was felt that the young nation would need. Thereafter literature began to penetrate into German educational system, including universities, and criticism in the public media.

The new topic was of immense interest because it focussed on the idea of a national literature, and threw a controversial perspectives on the nation's history and identity, and attempts to reform the publishing of fiction. The secularization of society propelled the discussion of national literature forward in both France and Germany. Literature now offered texts of international significance, that could be used in schools and universities instead of religious texts.

What had happened in Germany subsequently persuaded scholars in France and Italy to write similar histories to that of Georg Gottfried Gervinus for their own countries. However, the English speaking world remained rather uninterested and it was Frenchman Hippolyte Taine who eventually wrote the first history of English literature in 1863, at first in French, and an English version a year later that opened with a look back at the recent history of modern literary history:

HISTORY, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures.The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful. We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give them their place in history, and one of the highest.

The English speaking world adopted the new, nationalistic analysis of literature reluctantly. London had developed a commercial production of the belles lettres, independent from the markets of Amsterdam and Paris, as early as the early 18th century. The new market had found its own commercial criticism and did not need an academic variant with a distinctly national perspective. Shakespeare had become an object of national veneration without the help of academic critics by the 1760s. A rediscovery of the past had followed, with such doubtful discoveries as the Ossian fragments. Critics discussed the belles lettres in fashionable English journals and the latest theatre performances were reviewed in newspapers at the end of the 18th century. The continental debate of about literature therefore remained initially of little interest in Britain.

Furthermore Great Britain did not need new national platforms. State politics and religion were open platforms, in Britain protected by modern press laws since the 1690s. However, Continental Europe had opted for a fundamental secularization of society. On the other hand the British constitution rested on a union of Church and State, and the USA on a separation of Church and State. Neither country needed to employ literary text the way that religious texts had been used previously. In Great Britain the criticism of plays and fictions was served by the commercial criticism the market created. Germany, on the other hand invented a dualism of "Literaturwissenschaft", literary criticism formulated by university professors, and "Literaturkritik", literary criticism to be found in the newspapers. However, a single phrase is sufficient in English.

The new topic of a national literature was eventually adopted both in Britain and the US in the 1870 and 1880s, and the educational systems of the various Western nations developed international standards. The Western canon became the project of a new international competition. The Western nations defined themselves as "Kulturnationen", exporters of a specific Western civilization to their expanding Colonial Empires, which eventually shared the same educational institutions as the colonizing powers.

New commercial rules began to shape the relationship between author, publisher and reader. Most of the early-18th-century authors of fiction had published anonymously. They had offered their manuscripts and received all the payment to be expected for the manuscript. The new copyright laws introduced in the 18th and 19th centuries promised a profit share on all future editions. This created a new market for experimental novels that readers might find difficult to understand. Such works were published in a small first edition, in the hope that the critics would recognize their artistic merit. Novelists, mere purveyors of entertainment at one time, now assumed a new role as public voices, speaking as their nation's conscience, as national sages, and farsighted judges in newspapers, in public debates. The novelist who reads in theatres, halls, and book shops is a 19th-century invention.

Fiction was altered by these changes and difficult texts were created that could not be understood without the aid of critical interpretation. New novels openly addressed the present political and social issues, which were also discussed by other media. The idea of responsibility became a key issue, whether of the citizen whose voice is heard, or of the artist whose work future generations will evaluate. The theoretical debate concentrated on the moral soundness of modern novels, on the integrity of individual artists, as well as the provocative claims of aestheticists such as Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who proposed to write "art for art's sake".

Works of literature were matched by a growing market of popular fiction. In the 19th-century new institutions like the circulating library create a new market for publishers' first editions. Fiction also became the object of a new mass reading public protected, monitored and analysed by nationwide debates and by institutions the state would hope to control. These developments did not, however, lead to stable definitions of the terms it popularized, so that Art, literature and culture became the arena of controversy.

The modern individual

The individual, the potentially isolated hero, had stood at the centre of romantic fictions since the Middle Ages. The early novel(la) had placed the story itself at the centre: it was driven by plot, by incident and accident, rather than being the story of a single larger-than-life figure. And yet, the individual had returned with a wave of satirical romances and historical pseudo romances. Individuals such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Clarissa reintroduced the old romantic focus on the individual as the centre of what was to become the modern novel.

Ancient, medieval and early modern fictional characters lacked certain features that modern readers expect. Epics and romances created heroes, individuals who would fight against knight after knight, change (as an Assyrian princess) into men's clothes, survive alone on an island â€" while it would never see its personal experience as an individualizing factor. The early modern novelist had remained a historian as much as the author of the most personal French contemporary memoir. As soon as it came to relating the facts and experiences, it became a question of proper writing skills.

The modern individual changed. The rift can first be seen in the works of medieval mystics and early modern Protestant autobiographers: moments in which they witnessed a change in their very experience of things, an inner isolation they would only be able to communicate to someone who had experienced the same. The sentimental experience created a new field of â€" secular, rather than religiously motivated â€" individualizations which immediately invited followers to join. Werther's step out of the value systems that surrounded him, his desperate search for the one and only soul to understand him, inspired an instantaneous European fashion. Napoleon told Goethe he had read the volume about a dozen times; others were seen wearing breeches in Werther's colour to signal that they were experiencing the same exceptionalism. The novel proved the ideal medium for the new movements as it was ultimately written from an individual's point of view with the aim to unfold in the silence of another's individual mind.

The late-18th-century exploration of personal developments created room for depictions of personal experiences; it gained momentum with the romantic exploration of fictionality as a medium of creative imagination; and it gained a political edge with the 19th-century focus on history and the modern societies. The rift between the individual and his or her social environment had to have roots in personal developments which this individual shared with those around him or her, with his or her class or the entire nation. Any such rift had the power to criticize the collective histories the modern nations were just then producing. The new personal perceptions the protagonists of novels offered were on the other hand interesting as they could easily become part of the collective experience the modern nation had to create.

The novel's individual perspective allowed for personal reevaluations of the public historical perceptions and it allowed for personal developments that could still lead back into modern societies. The 19th-century Bildungsroman became the arena of such explorations of personal developments that separated the individual from, and then reunited it with, his or her social environment. Outsider perspectives became the field of mid-19th-century explorations. The artist's life had been an interesting topic before with the artist being by public definition the exceptional individual whose perceptions naturally enabled him to produce different views. Novels from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795) to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913â€"1927) and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) created an entire genre of the Künstlerroman. Jane Austen's Emma (1815), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873â€"77), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871â€"72) brought female protagonists into the role of the outstanding observer. Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1839) and Gottfried Keller's Green Henry (1855) focused on the perspectives of children, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) added a drop-out student who became a murderer to the spectrum of special observers whose views would promise reinterpretations of modern life.

The exploration of the individual's perception eventually revolutionized the very modes of writing fiction. The search for one's personal style stood in the centre of the competition among authors in the 19th century, now that novelists had become publicly celebrated minds. The destabilization of the author-text connection, which 20th-century criticism was to propose later on, finally led to experiments with what had been the individual's voice so far â€" speaking through the author or portrayed by him. These options were to be widened with new concepts of what texts actually were with the beginning of the 20th century.

The 20th century and later

Global market place

Given the number of new editions and the place of the modern novel among the genres sold in bookshops today, the novel is far from the crisis predicted by John Barth. Literature has not ended in "exhaustion" or in a silent "death". New technologies continue to be rapidly adapted for the writing and distributing of novels. In 1968, four years after the introduction of the first word processor, the IBM MT/ST, the first novel was written on it â€" Len Deighton's Bomber, published in 1970. Printed books have not yet been superseded by new media such as cinema, television or such new channels of distribution as the Internet, or e-books. Novels such as the Harry Potter (1997â€"2007) books have created public sensation among an audience critics had seen as lost.

Novels were among the first material artefacts the Nazis burnt in public celebrations of their power in 1933; and they remained the very last thing they allowed their publishers to print as World War II ended in the devastation of central Europe: fiction could still be employed to keep the retreating troops in dream worlds of an idyllic homeland waiting for them. Novels were in the pockets of American soldiers who went to Vietnam and in the pockets of those who protested against the Vietnam War: Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan (1972) had become cult classics of inner resistance. While it was difficult to learn anything about Siberia's concentration camps in the strictly censored Soviet media, it was a novel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and its proto-historic expansion The Gulag Archipelago (1973) that eventually gave the world an inside view.

The novel remains both public and private. It is a public product of modern print culture even where it circulates in illegal samizdat copies. It remains difficult to target. Totalitarian regimes can close down Internet service providers, and control theatres, cinemas, radio and television stations, while individual paper copies of a novel can be smuggled into countries, defying strict censorship, and read there in cafés and parks almost as safely as at home. Its covers can be as inconspicuous as those of Iranian editions of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988). An Orwellian regime would have to search households and to burn every retrievable copy: an engagement of dystopian dimensions that only a novel, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), would envisage.

The artefact that constituted one of the earliest flashpoints in the current cultural confrontation between the secular West and the Islamic East, Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1988), exemplifies almost all the advantages the modern novel has over its rivals. It is a work of epic dimensions no film maker could achieve, a work of privacy and individuality of perspective wherever it leads into the dream worlds of its protagonists, a work that uniquely anticipated ensuing political debates, and a work many Western critics classified as one of the greatest novels ever written. It is postmodernist in its ability to play with the entire field of literary traditions without ever sacrificing its topicality.

The democratic West depicted itself as the advocate of literature as the freest form of self-expression. The Islamic fundamentalist interpretation of the same confrontation has its own historical validity. This interpretation sees a conflict between Western secular nations and a postsecular religious world. In this view, the West has severed its religious roots and begun to idolize an arrangement of secular "pluralistic" debates. "Literature", "art", and "history" â€" the subject matter of the humanities â€" have become a Western substitute for religion. The Islamic republic eventually demonstrated how far the West had created its own inviolable if not sacred spheres in this development: Westerners can become atheists, they can admire any "blasphemy" as "art", but they cannot act with the same freedom in the field of history. Holocaust denial is criminalised in several Western nations in defence of secular pluralism. The Islamic nations protect, so goes the rationale, at the heart of the conflict a different hierarchy of discourses.

In a longer perspective, the conflict arose with the worldwide expansion of Western literary and cultural life in the 20th century. To look back, around 1700 fiction had been a small but virulent market of fashionable books in the sphere of public history. By contrast, in 19th-century Europe the novel had become the center of a new literary debate. The 20th century began with the Western export of new global conflicts, new technologies of telecommunication and new industries. The new arrangement of the academic disciplines became a world standard. Within this system the humanities are the ensemble of subjects that evaluate and organise public debate, from art and literature to history. Former colonies and modern third world nations adopted this arrangement in their educational systems in order to pursue equal footing with the "leading" industrial nations. Literature entered their public spheres almost automatically as the arena of free personal expression and as a field of national pride in which one had to search for one's historical identity, as the Western nations had done before.

A number of literatures could challenge the West with traditions of their own: Chinese novels are older than many comparable Western works. The beginning of the Chinese novel is hard to determine. First evidence is found in the "hua-pen" ("story-texts")of the Northern Sung dynasty (960-1127). The novels were recited in tea houses or outside in the street. All the same the genre has also been described as having "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with historical roots in Classical Greece and Rome. Other regions of the world had to begin their traditions as the Slavonic and Scandinavian nations had done in the 19th-century: South Asia and Latin America joined the production of world literature at the beginning of the 20th century. The question of what was the first African novel to be written by a black African author is today a topic of research in postcolonialist literary studies. The race was fueled by Western theories of cultural superiority: 20th-century critics such as Georg Lukács and Ian Watt saw the novel as the form of self-expression characteristic of the "modern Western individual". The worldwide spread of the novel was monitored and mentored by such Western institutions as the Nobel Prize in Literature. The list of its laureates can be read as a chronicle of the gradual expansion of Western literary life. Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias received the Nobel Prize in 1967, Japanese Yasunari Kawabata in 1968, Colombian Gabriel García Márquez in 1982; the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, honoured in 1986, became the first black African author to receive the award; the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz became the first novelist of the Arab world to do so in 1988; Kenzaburō Ōe, honoured in 1994 is a Japanese novelist, Orhan Pamuk, honoured in 2006, is a Turkish novelist.

The contemporary novel defends the significance it had won by the 1860s, and it has stepped beyond, into a new awareness of its public outreach. Nationwide debates can become international debates at any given moment. Today's novelists can address a worldwide public, with international institutions, prestigious prizes, and such far-reaching associations as the worldwide association of writers P.E.N. The exiled author, who is celebrated by the international audience while he or she is persecuted at home is a 20th-century (and now 21st-century) figure. The author as keeper of his or her nation's conscience is a new cultural icon of the age of globalization.

Back in the early 18th century some 20â€"60 titles per year, that is between one and three percent of the total annual English production of about 2,000 titles, could be reckoned as fiction â€" a total of 20,000â€"60,000 copies on the assumption of standard print runs of about 1,000 copies. In 2001 fiction made about 11% of the 119,001 titles published in the UK consumer book market. The percentage has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, though the total numbers doubled from 5,992 in 1986 to 13,076 in 2001. The press output and the money made with fiction have risen disproportionately since the 18th century: According to Nielsen BookScan statistics published in 2009 UK publishers sold an estimated 236.8 million books in 2008. Adult fiction (an estimated 75.3 million copies) made 32% of this market. Children's, young adult and educational books, a section comprising best-sellers such as the Harry Potter volumes, made another 63.4 million copies, 27%. The total UK consumer market is supposed to have had a value £1,773m in 2008. Adult fiction made roughly a quarter of that value: £454m.

A vibrant literary life fuels the market. It unfolds in a complex interaction between authors, their publishing houses, the reading public, and a literary criticism of immense diversity voiced in the media and in the nation's educational systems. The latter provide through their branches of academic criticism many of the topics, the modes of discussion and to a good extent the experts themselves who teach and discuss literature in schools and in the media. Modern marketing of fiction reflects this complex interaction with an awareness of the specific reverberations a new title must find in order to reach a wider audience. Different levels of communication mark successful modern novels as a result of the genre's present position in (or outside) literary debates. An elite exchange has developed between novelists and literary theorists, allowing for direct interactions between authors and critics. Authors who write literary criticism can eventually modify the very criteria under which theorists discuss their works. Literary recognition can also be gained when novels influence thinking about non-literary controversies. A third option remains with novels that find their audiences without the help of critical debate. Even serious novels can become the object of direct marketing strategies along the lines publishers usually reserve for "popular fiction".

Modernism and post-modernism

Many of the techniques the novel developed over the past 100 years can be understood as the result of competition with new mass media: film, comic books and at the end of the century the World Wide Web. Shot and sequence, focus and perspective have moved from film editing to literary composition. Experimental 20th-century fiction is, at the same time, influenced by literary theory.

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: a "stream of consciousness". This term was first used by William James in 1890 and entered the terminology of literary criticism with the discussions of the novels of modernists like Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, as well as, later Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. The characters endowed with these new voices had no firm ground from which to narrate and their readers had to re-create what was purposefully broken. One of the aims was to represent the reality of thoughts, sensations and conflicting perspectives. William Faulkner was particularly concerned with recreating real life, an undertaking which he said was unattainable. The argumentative structure, which a narration had used in previous centuries to make its points, had lost its importance. Also in the 1920s expressionist Alfred Döblin went in a different direction with Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), where interspersed non-fictional text fragments enter the fictional sphere to create another new form of realism to 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 the 1960s, fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental structural concepts.

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 had already been an accepted truth in the world of pulp fiction. A postmodernist re-reads popular literature as an essential cultural production. The creative avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s "closed the gap" and recycled popular knowledge, conspiracy theories, comics and films to recombine these materials into entirely new works of art. Roland Barthes' 1950s analysis of popular culture, and his late 1960s claim that the author was dead while the text continued to live, became standards of postmodern theory. 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 a universe of intertextual references while they thematized their own creativity in a new postmodern metafictional awareness.

What separated these authors from their 18th- and 19th-century predecessors, who had also invited other textual worlds into their own compositions, was the interaction the new authors sought with the field of literary criticism. 20th-century metafictional works expect literary historians to deal with them; literary critics and theorists become the privileged first readers that the new texts need. James Joyce is said to have said, to have joked, that in Ulysses, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality," a statement to which Salman Rushdie referred in 1999, when asked about the possibility of there being "Cliff's Notes" to his writings. Rushdie answered that although he didn't expect readers to get all the allusions in his works, he didn't think such notes would detract from the reading of them, and added: "James Joyce once said after he had published Ulysses that he had given the professors work for many years to come; and I'm always looking for ways of employing professors, so I hope to have given them some work too."

Novelists such as John Barth, Raymond Federman, Lance Olsen, and Umberto Eco went still further, by mixing criticism and fiction, creating "critifiction" (a term Raymond Federman attempted to coin in 1993).

While the postmodern movement has been criticized as too reliant on theory, and escapist, it was successfully exploited in several films of the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century: Pulp Fiction (1994), Memento (2000), and The Matrix (1999â€"2003) can be read as new textual constructs designed to prove that we are surrounded by virtual realities, by realities we construct out of circulating fragments, of images, concept, a language of cultural materials, which the new filmmakers explore.

Writing world history

On the one hand, media and institutions of criticism enable the modern novel to become the object of global debate. On the other hand, novels themselves, individual books, continue to arouse attention with unique personal and subjective narratives that challenge all circulating views of world history. Novels remain personal. Their authors remain independent individuals even where they become public figures, in contrast to historians and journalists who tend, by contrast, to assume official positions. The narrative style remains free and artistic, whereas modern history has by contrast almost entirely abandoned narration and turned to the critical debate of interpretations. Novels are seen as part of the realm of "art", defended as a realm of free and subjective self-expression. Crossovers into other genres â€" the novel as film, the film as novel, the amalgam of the novel and the comic book that led to the evolution of the graphic novel â€" have strengthened the genre's influence on the collective imagination and the arena of ongoing debates.

Personal realities have attracted 20th- and 21st-century novelists: first in an explicit reaction to the new science of psychology, later, far more importantly, in a renewed interest in subject matter that almost automatically destabilizes and marginalizes the realities of "common sense" and collective history. Personal anxieties, daydreams, magic and hallucinatory experiences mushroomed in 20th-century novels. What would be a clinical psychosis if stated as a personal experience â€" in one extreme example, Gregor Samsa, the point of view character of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, awakes to find that he has become a giant insect â€" will, as soon as it is transformed into a novel, become the object of competing literary interpretations, a metaphor, an image of the modern experience of personal instability and isolation. The term "Kafkaesque" has joined the term "Orwellian" in common parlance to refer not only to aspects of literature, but of the world.

Horror has also been an extremely popular genre in literature. Many are from famous horror-writer Stephen King and known horror writer Dean Koontz. King has written over 100 stories throughout his lifetime. His first published novel was Carrie, a horror novel about a teenage girl tormented by her fellow schoolmates and her religious-crazed mother, she uses her powers of telekinesis to exact revenge. The novel became a best-seller. But King's first hardback best-seller is the well-known novel The Shining, about a family who moves into a hotel in Colorado and the husband takes a job there. The son, Danny Torrance, has the power to see ghosts and malevolent spirits, which is called "Shining". The novel adapted into a 1980 horror film and that became named as one of Hollywood's most scariest films. Not all horror novels are written for adults. R.L. Stine is a children's horror writer, best known for writing the popular Goosebumps series. Neil Gaiman wrote the children's horror novella Coraline, a story about a girl and her family moving into an apartment and she finds a secret door to a perfect world, but later finds out that the world is a trap to capture her and destroy her. The novella was a success, winning the Bram Stoker Award. It was later adapted into the Academy-Award nominated film Coraline.

Each generation of the 20th century saw its unique aspects expressed in novels. Germany's lost generation of World War I veterans identified with the hero of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) (and with the tougher, more existentialist rival Thor Goote created as a national socialist alternative). The Jazz Age found a voice in F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Great Depression in John Steinbeck and the incipient Cold War in George Orwell. France's existentialism was prominently voiced in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus' The Stranger (1942). The counterculture of the 1960s gave Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927) a new reception, while producing such iconic works of its own as Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) became (with the help of the film adaptation) an icon of late-20th-century manhood and a reaction to the 20th-century production of female voices. Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek became prominent female and feminist voices. Questions of racial and gender identities, the option to reclaim female heroines of a predominantly male cultural industry have fascinated novelists over the last two decades with their potential to destabilize the preceding confrontations.

The major 20th-century social processes can be traced through the modern novel: the history of the sexual revolution can be traced through the reception of sexually frank novels: 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 opened itself to the production of frankly pornographic works such as Anne Desclos' Story of O (1954) to Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus (1978).

Crime became a major subject of 20th- and 21st-century novelists. The extreme confrontations of crime fiction reach into the very realities that modern industrialized, organized societies try and fail to eradicate. Crime is also an intriguing personal and public subject: criminals each have their personal motivations and actions. Detectives, too, see their moral codes challenged. Patricia Highsmith's thrillers became a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1985â€"1986) crossed the borders into the field of experimental postmodernist literature.

The major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries have inspired novelists. The events of World War II found their reflections in novels from Günter Grass' The Tin Drum (1959) to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961). The ensuing cold war lives on in a bulk of spy novels that reach out into the realm of popular fiction. Latin American self-awareness in the wake of the (failing) left revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a "Latin American Boom", connected today with the names of Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez and the invention of a special brand of postmodern magic realism. The unstable status of Israel and the Middle East have become the subject of Israeli and Arab perceptions. Contemporary fiction has explored the realities of the post-Soviet nations and those of post-Tiananmen China. Arguably, though, international perceptions of these events have been shaped more by images than words. The wave of modern media images has, in turn, merged with the novel in the form of graphic novels that both exploit and question the status of circulating visual materials. Art Spiegelman's two-volume Maus and, perhaps more important in its new theoretical approach, his In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) â€" a graphic novel questioning the reality of the images the 9/11 attacks have produced â€" are interesting artefacts here.

The extreme options of writing alternative histories have created genres of their own. Fantasy has become a field of commercial fiction branching into the worlds of computer-animated role play and esoteric myth. Its center today is J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954/55), a work that mutated from a book written for young readers in search of openly fictionalised role models into a cultural artefact of epic dimensions. Tolkien successfully revived northern European epic literature from Beowulf and the North Germanic Edda to the Arthurian Cycles and turned their incompatible worlds into an epic of global confrontations that magically preceded all known confrontations.

Science fiction has developed a broad variety of genres from the technological adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable in the 1860s to new political and personal compositions. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) has become a touchpoint for debate of Western consumerist societies and their use of modern technologies. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) focuses on the options of resistance under the eyes of public surveillance. Stanisław Lem, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke became modern classical authors of experimental thought with a focus on the interaction between humans and machines. A new wave of authors has added post-apocalyptic fantasies and explorations of virtual realities in crossovers into the commercial production of quickly mutating sci-fi genres. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) became a cult classic here and founded a new brand of cyberpunk science fiction.

Popular fiction

Popular fiction shares the literary market place with other types of literature through the genres that they share.

The historic advantage of genres is to allow the direct marketing of fiction. While the reader of so-called elitist literature will follow public discussions of novels, the popular production has to employ the traditionally more direct and short-term marketing strategies with the open declarations of their content. Genres fill the gap that the absent critics leaves, and work as direct promises of reading pleasure. The most typical stratum of popular fiction is based entirely on genre expectations, which it fixes with serializations and identifiable brand names. Ghost writers hide behind collective pseudonyms to ensure the steady supply of fiction that will have the very same hero, the very same story arc, and the very same number of pages, issue after issue.

Though a production not promoted by secondary criticism it is popular literature that holds the largest market share. Romance fiction had an estimated $1.375 billion share in the US book market in 2007. Religion/inspirational literature followed with $819 million, science fiction/fantasy with $700 million, mystery with $650 million and then classic literary fiction with $466 million.

The most important subgenres, in this period, were according to Romance Writers of America '​s data, given on the basis of numbers of releases:

• Contemporary series romance: 26%
• Contemporary romance: 22%
• Historical romance: 16%
• Paranormal romance: 12%
• Romantic suspense: 7%
• Inspirational romance: 7%
• Romantic suspense (series): 5%
• Other (chick-lit, erotic romance, women's fiction): 3%
• Young adult romance: 3%

In an historical perspective modern popular literature might be seen as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both fields share a focus on readers who are in search of easily accessible reading satisfaction. Early modern booksellers saw a reduced vocabulary and a focus on plot as the advantages in the abridged versions that they sold. The market of chapbooks disappeared, however, in the course of the 19th century. The German rediscovery of chapbooks in the 1840s and their new identification as a distinct, and truly original, production of "Volksbücher", books the people had created, is noteworthy. The popular modern works had by that time developed out of the early modern belles lettres. John J. Richetti was the first to point out the various similarities within the spectrum of genres.

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; it goes back, again, to the libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, to John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1749) and its companions of the elegant 18th-century market. 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 exploits Tolkien, as well as Arthurian literature and its romantic 19th-century reflections. Modern horror fiction also has no precedent on the market of chapbooks â€" it goes back to the elitist market of early-19th-century romantic literature. Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history, hardly dating past the 1860s.

The emerging field of popular fiction immediately created its own stratifications with a production of bestselling authors such as Raymond Chandler, Barbara Cartland, Ian Fleming, Johannes Mario Simmel, Rosamunde Pilcher, Stephen King, Ken Follett, Patricia Cornwell, and Dan Brown who enjoy the potential to attract fans and who appear as role models in author-fan relationships. The typical popular market segment does not develop any mythologies of authorship, and hardly differentiates between hero and author: readers buys the new Perry Rhodan, Captain Future, or Jerry Cotton.

Popular fiction has dealt with almost any topic the modern public sphere has provided. Class and gender divisions are omnipresent in love stories: the majority of them harp on tragic confrontations that arise wherever a heroine of lower social status falls in love with a doctor, the wealthy heir of an estate or company, or just the Alpine farmer whose maid she happens to be. It is not said that these aspirations lead to happy endings. They can be read as escapist dreams of how to change social status by marriage; they are at the same time constant indicators of existing or imaginary social barriers. All major political confrontations of the past one hundred years have become the scenery of popular exploits, whether they focused on soldiers, spies, or on civilians fighting between the lines.

The authors of popular fictionâ€"and that is the essential difference between them and their counterparts in the sphere of so-called elitist literatureâ€"tend to proclaim that they have simply exploited the controversial topics. Dan Brown does this on his website answering the question whether his Da Vinci Code could be called an "anti-Christian" novel:

No. This book is not anti-anything. It's a novel. I wrote this story in an effort to explore certain aspects of Christian history that interest me. The vast majority of devout Christians understand this fact and consider The Da Vinci Code an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate. Even so, a small but vocal group of individuals has proclaimed the story dangerous, heretical, and anti-Christian. While I regret having offended those individuals, I should mention that priests, nuns, and clergy contact me all the time to thank me for writing the novel. Many church officials are celebrating The Da Vinci Code because it has sparked renewed interest in important topics of faith and Christian history. It is important to remember that a reader does not have to agree with every word in the novel to use the book as a positive catalyst for introspection and exploration of our faith

The author of popular fiction has a fan community to serve and satisfy. He or she can risk rebuffing both the critical public and its literary experts in their search for interesting readings (as Dan Brown effectively does with his statement on possible readings of his novel). The popular author's position towards his text is generally supposed to be relaxed. Authors of other types of literature are by contrast supposed to be compelled to write. They follow (says the popular mythology) their inner voices, a feeling for injustice, an urge to face a personal trauma, an artistic vision. The authors of popular fiction have their own calling: they must not fail the expectations of their audiences. A covenant of loyalty and mutual respect is the basis on which the author of popular fiction continues his or her work. The typical branches of the production have no contact to mythologies of authorship.

The artificial and arbitrary boundaries between popular and so-called serious literature have blurred in recent years, through the explorations of postmodern and poststructuralist writers, as well as the exploitation of popular literary classics by the film industry. The present landscape of media â€" with television and the Internet indiscriminately reaching the entire audience â€" has a potential to destabilize boundaries between the fields. The division lines are, on the other hand, likely to stay intact as the critical discourse continues to need and to produce privileged objects of debate.

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

17th- and 18th-century views

• 1651: Paul Scarron, The Comical Romance, Chapter XXI. "Which perhaps will not be found very Entertaining" (London, 1700). Scarron's plea for a French production rivalling the Spanish "Novels". online edition
• 1670: Pierre Daniel Huet, "Traitté de l'origine des Romans", Preface to Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne comtesse de La Fayette, Zayde, histoire espagnole (Paris, 1670). A world history of fiction. pdf-edition Gallica France
• 1683: [Du Sieur], "Sentimens sur l'histoire" from: Sentimens sur les lettres et sur l'histoire, avec des scruples sur le stile (Paris: C. Blageart, 1680). The new novels as published masterly by Marie de LaFayette. online edition
• 1702: Abbe Bellegarde, "Lettre à une Dame de la Cour, qui lui avoit demandé quelques Reflexions sur l'Histoire" in: Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale (La Haye: Adrian Moetjens, 1702). Paraphrase of Du Sieur's text. online edition
• 1705/1708/1712: [Anon.] In English, French and German the Preface of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (Albigion, 1705). Bellegarde's article plagiarised. online edition
• 1713: Deutsche Acta Eruditorum, German review of the French translation of Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis 1709 (Leipzig: J. L. Gleditsch, 1713). A rare example of a political novel discussed by a literary journal. online edition
• 1715: Jane Barker, preface to her Exilius or the Banish'd Roman. A New Romance (London: E. Curll, 1715). Plea for a "New Romance" following Fénlon's Telmachus. online edition
• 1718: Johann Friedrich Riederer, "Satyra von den Liebes-Romanen", from: Die abentheuerliche Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kappe, 2 (Nürnberg, 1718). German satire about the widespread reading of novels and romances. online edition
• 1742: Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews (London, 1742). The "comic epic in prose" and its poetics. online edition

Secondary literature

• Erwin Rohde Der Griechesche Roman und seine Vorläufer (1876) [un-superseded history of the ancient novel] (German)
• Lukács, Georg (1971, 1916). The Theory of the Novel. trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. 
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. About novel. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981. [written during the 1930s]
• Watt, Ian (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of Los Angeles Press.  Watt reads Robinson Crusoe as the first modern "novel" and interprets the rise of the modern novel of realism as an achievement of English literature, owed to a number of factors from early capitalism to the development of the modern individual.
• Burgess, Anthony (1963). The Novel To-day. London: Longmans, Green. 
• Burgess, Anthony (1967). The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction. London: Faber. 
• Ben Edwin Perry The Ancient Romances (Berkeley, 1967) review
• Richetti, John J. (1969). Popular Fiction before Richardson. Narrative Patterns 1700â€"1739. Oxford: OUP. ISBN. 
• Burgess, Anthony (1970). "Novel, The" â€" classic Encyclopædia Britannica entry.
• Miller, H. K., G. S. (1970) Rousseau and Eric Rothstein, The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). ISBN 0-19-811697-7
• Arthur Ray Heiserman The Novel Before the Novel (Chicago, 1977) ISBN 0-226-32572-5
• Madden, David; Charles Bane; Sean M. Flory (2006) [1979]. A Primer of the Novel: For Readers and Writers (revised ed.). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-5708-1.  Updated edition of pioneering typology and history of over 50 genres; index of types and technique, and detailed chronology.
• Spufford, Magaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London, 1981).
• Davis, Lennard J. (1983). Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-05420-3. 
• Spencer, Jane, The Rise of Woman Novelists. From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford, 1986).
• Armstrong, Nancy (1987). Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504179-8. 
• McKeon, Michael (1987). The Origins of the English Novel, 1600â€"1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-3291-8. 
• Reardon (ed.), Bryan (1989). Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04306-5. 
• Hunter, J. Paul (1990). Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-02801-1. 
• Ballaster, Ros (1992). Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-811244-0. 
• Doody, Margaret Anne (1996). The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2168-8. 
• Relihan, Constance C. (ed.), Framing Elizabethan fictions: contemporary approaches to early modern narrative prose (Kent, Ohio/ London: Kent State University Press, 1996). ISBN 0-87338-551-9
• "Reconsidering The Rise of the Novel," Eighteenth Century Fiction, Volume 12, Number 2-3, ed. David Blewett (Januaryâ€"April 2000).
• McKeon, Michael, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
• Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405â€"1726 revised edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
• Simons, Olaf (2001). Marteaus Europa, oder, Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde: eine Untersuchung des Deutschen und Englischen Buchangebots der Jahre 1710 bis 1720. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN 90-420-1226-9.  A market study of the novel around 1700 interpreting contemporary criticism.
• Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant: radicale ideeën in Nederlandse pornografische romans 1670â€"1700 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2002). ISBN 90-75697-89-9.
• Price, Leah (2003). The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53939-0.  from Leah Price
• Rousseau, George (2004). Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). ISBN 1-4039-3454-1
• Roilos, Panagiotis, Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
• Mentz, Steve, Romance for sale in early modern England: the rise of prose fiction (Aldershot [etc.]: Ashgate, 2006). ISBN 0-7546-5469-9
• Rubens, Robert, "A hundred years of fiction: 1896 to 1996. (The English Novel in the Twentieth Century, part 12)." Contemporary Review, December 1996.
• Schmidt, Michael, The Novel: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014).
• Schultz, Lydia, "Flowing against the traditional stream: consciousness in Tillie Olsen's 'Tell Me a Riddle.'" Melus, 1997.
• Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History. Vol. 1, Beginnings to 1600: Continuum, 2010. Vol. 2, 1600â€"1800: Bloomsbury, 2013.