THE RISE OF THE Novel PDF

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Novel and its Beginnings ...

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THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

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). However, what happened in the 18th century is not so much the rise of the novel, but rather the rise of realism in fiction, which is what Ian Watt sees as distinguishing the novel from earlier prose narratives. By around 1700, fiction was no longer a predominantly aristocratic entertainment, and printed books had soon gained the power to reach readers of almost all classes, though the reading habits differed and to follow fashions remained a privilege. In the 18th century, the appearance of newspapers and magazines attracted a large number of readers from the middle class. These new readers had little interest in the romances and the tragedies which had interested the upper class. Thus need for new type of literature rose that would express the new ideas of the 18 th century and this new type of literature was none but novel. In the 18th century, women of upper classes and the middle classes could partake in a few activities of men. However, with the rise of the public sphere and with the spread of education, a certain taste for reading novels developed among women. The group of the first four novelists of the Augustan Age or Neo-classical age: Richardson, Smollett, Fielding and Sterne, in whose hands Novel blossomed, are called the four pillars of the English novel.

Daniel Defoe (1660-1725) is often pointed out as the originator of the English novel. His prose fiction, sprang from an experimental involvement in other literary forms, most notably the polemic pamphlet, the biography, the history and the travel-book. His novels included elements of all of these forms. He may, in The Life and the Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), have perfected an impression of realism by adapting Puritan self confession narratives to suit the mode of a fictional moral tract, but he would in no sense have seen that he was pioneering a new art form. Defoe was merely mastering and exploiting a literary form of various and uncertain origins. His later prose fiction, like Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) , Captain Singleton (1720), Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724) often bear imprints of an episodic structure and lack the overarching integrity of a novel’s plot. The voice of the narrator is also exclusively in first person. Yet, Defoe is indeed an important precursor of modern English novel. The novels of Henry Fielding (1707-54) and Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), written in the 1740s, form what Richardson himself called ‘a new species of writing’. They do not so much reject the autobiographical model established by Defoe as amplify and finally supersede it. The phenomenal popularity of Richardson’s work with readers at home and abroad is well attested. His Pamela (the first two volumes of which appeared in 1740) ran through six London editions in its first year of publication. Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded sprang directly from this recall of the kind of true story likely to appeal to a self made man with, what some might see as, a prurient concern with sexual rectitude. Pamela was not the first epistolary novel but it proved the most influential. Pamela’s story is told partly through long letters to her worthy parents and partly through her recourse to her journal. The reward for Pamela’s virtue is the respect, and ultimately the love, of her erstwhile employer, Mr B., but the slow process of the winning of this reward has persuaded certain of her readers to see her as a calculating hypocrite and an upwardly mobile self seeker well aware of the marital price of her virtue. Similar charges cannot be brought against Richardson’s masterpiece, the huge but meticulously shaped Clarissa:or, The History of a Young Lady (1748). The novel has four major letter-writers, Clarissa Harlowe and her friend Anna Howe, Lovelace and his friend John Belford, and, beyond these four, a host of minor correspondents or notewriters, perceptive and myopic, involved and detached, fluent and semi-literate. Clarissa is not merely multi-voiced, it also exploits the narrative potential of multiple viewpoints. Richardson’s third epistolary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1754), never satisfyingly emulates the tensions or sustains the anxieties so powerfully evoked in Clarissa. It is evident that Richardson’s narratives reflect values and concerns that evolved in the bourgeois society of England in which social transformation destabilized age old gender norms.

Henry Fielding, an early and contemptuous detractor of Pamela, found himself so overwhelmed by Clarissa. Fielding had, however, learned much from his practical experience of the stage. His novels reveal a grasp of idiomatic speech and dialogue, a sound understanding of the patterning of incident. His delight in burlesque also influenced the first of his two satires on Pamela, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews of 1741. When Fielding returned to the attack in The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr Abraham Adams in 1742 he rejected the inward-looking epistolary form in favour of a third-person narrative. His narrator is talkative, clubbable, knowing, and manipulative; he speaks urbanely, sharing jokes and educated allusions with the reader, shifting us into a world of sophisticated gentlemanly discourse quite alien to Richardson. Although Joseph Andrews begins as a parody of Pamela, by tracing the complications of the life of Pamela’s brother, it rapidly transcends the parodic mood by experimenting with a new, neo-classical fictional form. In his Preface to the novel Fielding insisted that his was ‘a kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language’ and he outlined the concept of ‘a comic epic poem in prose’. Fielding’s The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great, published as the third volume of his Miscellanies in 1743, further ramifies the novelist’s experimental interest in the force of the ridiculous as an exposer of the hypocritical. In his longest and most articulate work, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), however, Fielding returned to the ambiguities of ‘goodness’ and ‘greatness’. The novel’s often wayward hero is told by his noble guardian, Squire Allworthy, that he has ‘much goodness, generosity and honour’ in his temper but that in order to be happy he must add the further qualities of ‘prudence and religion’. To read Tom Jones as a reassertion of old, élitist social and moral codes is to misread it. Essentially, it argues for the need for a broad reform of society, an ethic emphasized through the narrator's reiterated declaration that he is describing humankind as aspecies not as a group of individuals. Where Richardson had sought to examine the inner life of his confessional correspondents, Fielding’s narrator insists that he must generalize and observe the evidence of universal human characteristics. Tobias George Smollett (19 March 1721 – 17 September 1771) was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), which influenced later novelists including Charles Dickens. The Adventures of Roderick Random was modelled on Le Sage's Gil Blas and published in 1748. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickletells the story of an egotistical man who experiences luck and misfortunes in the height of 18th-century European society. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was the last of the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett, published in London on 17 June 1771 (just three months before Smollett's death), and is considered by many to be his best and funniest work.[1] It is an epistolary novel, presented in the form of letters written by six characters: Matthew Bramble, a Welsh Squire; his sister Tabitha; their niece Lydia and nephew Jeremy Melford; Tabitha's maid Winifred Jenkins; and Lydia's suitor Wilson. The panoramic portrayal of characters in Smolett’s fiction inspired the likes of later novelists like Charles Dickens.

Another novelist of the age is Lawrence Sterne (1713-68). He is, however, judged often variously. His novels are a bit different from the other conventional novels of the age and sufficiently reveal his originality and singularity as a novelist. Sterne’s Life and Adventures of Tristam Shandy, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767, is a voluminous work. The plot is loose and compound and not organic like Richardson’s or Fielding’s. His characters have certain enduring qualities in their behavior, temperament and sense of humour. The story is told in the first person and seem like a patchwork of different anecdotes, digressions, reflections, jests, parodies and so on. The 18th century novel evolved as a unique growth in the narrative strategy and reflected a secular understanding of the world. The Enlightenment culture buttressed this analytical framework and the narratorial voice was usually unaffected by supernatural imagination. The novel depicted a fallen, postlapsarian world where the reality of a Godless universe was taken for granted. These charted the terrains of a modern world – colonial, exploitative and yet, secular and self-conscious of its own mundaneness....