NOVEL IN MORE DETAIL

by abdo Sun Apr 10, 2011 12:01 pm

Novels[history/write

rs]

• The Romantic Novel • Major Romantic Novelists • The Victorian Novel •
• Major Victorian Novelists • Other Victorian Novelists of Note •
• Realism, Local Color, and Naturalism • Major 19th Century American Novelists •
Keep in mind that eras in literary history are not fixed and that novelists writing in one era may have more in common with the novelists of another era.
Also note that my emphasis here is on the novel in English.
The Romantic Novel
Romanticism is a movement in art and literature that began in Europe in the late 18th century and was most influential in the first half of the 19th century.
Romanticism fosters a return to nature and also values the imagination over reason and emotion over intellect.
One strain of the Romantic is the Gothic with its emphasis on tales of horror and the supernatural.
Major Romantic Novelists
CHARLOTTE BRONTE (1816-55)
Bronte's major novel Jane Eyre (1847) is the model for countless novels featuring governesses and mysterious strangers.
EMILY BRONTE (1818-48)
Bronte's major work Wuthering Heights (1847) is full of Gothic elements.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851)
Cooper's most popular novels of the frontier feature Natty Bumpo, a man at one with nature.
Major Works:
• The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
• The Deerslayer (1841)
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-64)

Hawthorne's novels are marked by his obsession with his Puritan ancestors and with the issue of guilt. His most famous novels feature elements of the Romantic and the Gothic.
Major Works:
• The Scarlet Letter (1850)
• The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-91)
Melville's novels are about the sea and seamen. His masterwork Moby Dick (1851) is a study in obsession and its consequences as well as an exploration of the nature of evil.

The Victorian Novel
The Victorian Age is marked roughly by the reign of Queen Victoria of England from 1837-1901.
The Victorian reading public firmly established the novel as the dominant literary form of the era. The novel is the most distinctive and lasting literary achievement of Victorian literature.
Earlier in the century Sir Walter Scott had created a large novel-reading public and had made the novel respectable. He had also strengthened the tradition of the 3-volume novel.
The publication of novels in monthly installments enabled even the poor to purchase them
The novelists of the Victorian era:
• accepted middle class values
• treated the problem of the individual's adjustment to his society
• emphasized well-rounded middle-class characters
• portrayed the hero as a rational man of virtue
• believed that human nature is fundamentally good and lapses are errors of judgment corrected by maturation
The Victorian novel appealed to readers because of its:
• realism
• impulse to describe the everyday world the reader could recognize
• introduction of characters who were blends of virtue and vice
• attempts to display the natural growth of personality
• expressions of emotion: love, humor, suspense, melodrama, pathos (deathbed scenes)
• moral earnestness and wholesomeness, including crusades against social evils and self-censorship to acknowledge the standard morality of the times.
The Victorian novel featured several developments in narrative technique:
• full description and exposition
• authorial essays
• multiplotting featuring several central characters
Furthermore, the practice of issuing novels in serial installments led novelists to become adept at subclimaxes.

Major Victorian Novelists CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
Dickens was the most successful of the English Victorian novelists, a master of sentiment and a militant reformer.
We admire Dickens for his:
• fertility of character creation
• depiction of childhood and youth
• comic creations
Major Works:
• A Christmas Carol (1843), most popular Christmas story in the English speaking world
• David Copperfield (1849-50), essentially autobiographical and Dickens' own favorite novel
• Bleak House (1852-3), the first Dickens novel with a carefully-knit plot

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63)
Thackeray's chief subject is the contrast between human pretensions and human weakness. He excelled at portraying his own upper middle class social stratum.
His major work is Vanity Fair (1847).
GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN EVANS) (1819-88)
Eliot is considered to be the first modern novelist, a creator of psychological fiction. She is known for her penetrating character analyses and convincingly realistic scenes.
In Eliot's novels plot did not need to depend upon external complications; it could rise from a character's internal groping toward knowledge and choice.
Major Works:
• Adam Bede (1859), a love triangle set in pre-industrial agricultural England
• Silas Marner (1861), the nearest thing to a perfect George Eliot novel with a plot about a miser who adopts a foundling and the theme of the regenerative power of humanity and love
• Middlemarch (1871-72), the first English novel concerned with the intellectual life, the story of a city during the agitated era of 1832 reforms, the Industrial Revolution, the Evangelical movement, and the new scientific outlook
THOMAS HARDY (1840-1920)
The characteristic Victorian novelist such as Dickens or Thackeray was concerned with the behavior and problems of people in a given social milieu which he described in detail.
Thomas Hardy preferred to go directly for the elemental in human behavior with a minimum of contemporary social detail. He felt that man was an alien in an impersonal universe and at the mercy of sheer chance.
Though readers assume he is a pessimist he called himself a meliorist, yearning hopefully for a better world.
Major Works:
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
• Jude the Obscure (1895)
The revolt in Jude the Obscure against indissoluble Victorian marriage (of Jude to Arabella and Sue Bridehead to Phillotson) aroused such a storm of protest over its religious pessimism and sex themes that Hardy turned thereafter exclusively to poetry.

Other Victorian Novelists of Note
WILKIE COLLINS(1824-89)
Collins is considered the father of the modern detective novel.
Major Works:
• The Woman in White (1860)
• The Moonstone (1868), the novel which G.K Chesterton termed "probably the best detective story in the world"
LEWIS CARROLL (CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON) (1832-98)
A mathematician, Carroll sublimated his anti-Victorianism in his writing.
Major Works:
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which remains one of the best-loved children's books in the English speaking world
• Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
Realism, Local Color, and Naturalism
In the United States the latter half of the 19th century was marked by recovery from the Civil War, the movement from rural areas to the cities, and the rise of industrialism and business.
Protest movements--led by unions or blacks or feminists--challenged the status quo.
As the major Romantic writers such as Hawthorne and Melville died or stopped writing for publication, a new breed of novelists, trained initially as journalists, rejected romanticism and insisted that the ordinary and the local were suitable subjects for artistic portrayal.
Realists had what Henry James called "a powerful impulse to mirror the unmitigated realities of life."
As the realists rejected romantic idealism and dependence on established moral truths they began to present subtleties of human personality and characters who were neither wholly good nor wholly bad. This philosophical realism gradually became increasingly pessimistic and deterministic as seen by the later works of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser
One group of writers championed local color writing, an amalgam of romanticism and realism with romantic plots coupled with a realistic portrayal of the dialects, custom, and sights of regional America.
The local color movement was a bridge between romanticism and realism and can be viewed as a subdivision of realism. It resulted from the desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization dispersed or homogenized them and to come to terms with the harsh realities that seemed to replace these early times.
Naturalism, which gained popularity near the end of the 19th century, is generally described as a new and harsher realism.
In an attempt to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, naturalistic novelists portrayed characters of low social and economic class shaped by environment and heredity and moved by animal passions.
In the view of the naturalists, environmental forces, whether of nature or the city, outweigh or overwhelm human agency; the individual can exert little or no control over events.

Major 19th Century American Novelists HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-96), whose novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was one of the many influences on the start of the American Civil War
HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)
James was not only a novelist but an influential critic of the novel whose prefaces to his own work were later collected in The Art of the Novel (1934). His exploration of point of view and his development of stream of consciousness technique have greatly influenced subsequent writers of fiction.
Major Works:
• The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
• The Wings of the Dove (1902)
• The Ambassadors (1903)
• The Golden Bowl (1904)
MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL LANGHORE CLEMENS) (1835-1910)

Twain's best work breaks out of the local color genre.
Major Works:
• Tom Sawyer (1876)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), generally considered to be the Great American Novel
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
• Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
KATE CHOPIN (1851-1904) was a local color writer whose works are set in the Creole society of Louisiana. The Awakening (1899) is an early feminist novel about a woman unhappy in her marriage.
JACK LONDON (1876-1916)
London's adventures in the Pacific Northwest and during the Alaska gold rush were the basis of his very popular short stories and novels such as The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea Wolf (1904).
EDITH WHARTON
Major Works:
• Ethan Frome (1911)
• The Age of Innocence (1920)
STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900)
The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Crane's novel of the Civil War, is generally considered one of the greatest war novels of all time. Crane had never seen combat when he wrote this novel.
THEODORE DREISER (1871-1945)
Major Works:
• Sister Carrie (1900)
• An American Tragedy (1925)
Overview
It is very hard to get perspective on and characterize, let alone evaluate, the literature of our own time because:
• We are too close to it.
• It is still writing itself.
• Literary historians' labels and generalizations about works are most often attached after the period in question is long over.
Literary historians describe two general phases of 20th century literature, divided by World War II:
• Modern literature--roughly 1900 or 1914--1945
• Contemporary literature--1945 to the present
The great overshadowing events of the 20th century include:
• World War I
• The Great Depression
• World War II, including the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
• The Cold War
• The launch of Sputnik and advent of space flight
• The end of colonialism and the rise of Third World countries
• The reshaping of the face of world Communism
A number of key thinkers have influenced the novels of the 20th century. They include:
• Charles Darwin,whose Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) described man as simply the occupant of the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder and who promoted the idea of survival of the fittest
• Karl Marx, who in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Capital (1867) saw history as the struggle between capitalist owners and the non propertied proletariat with the revolution ultimately won by the workers
• Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work valued instinct over intellect and insisted on the complete freedom of the individual in a world that lacks transcendent law ("God is Dead")
• Sir James Frazier, whose recounting of myths in The Golden Bough (1890) showed the continuity and similarity between primitive and civilized culture
• Sigmund Freud, who in Interpretation of Dreams (1899) put forth a new model of personality governed in large part by irrational and unconscious survivals of infantile fantasy
• Carl G. Jung, who described the concepts of the collective unconscious, a buried level of universal experience tapped by myth, religion, and art, and the concept of archetypes, the master patterns revealing the common experiences of the human species
• Max Planck whose quantum theory (1900) described the unpredictability of atomic and subatomic particles
• Albert Einstein whose theory of relativity (1905) abandoned concepts of absolute motion and absolute difference of time and space and proposed that reality consisted of a four-dimensional space-time continuum
• Werner Heisenburg whose Uncertainty Principle (1927) proclaimed that scientific measurement (specifically the measurement of electrons) was a matter of approximation emphasizing the approximate nature of reality
• Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) who saw the human condition as absurd because man exists in the world without any understanding of his fate
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), developer of existentialism, the belief that man is totally responsible for his own actions and that he ought to reject external laws

Albert Einstein
In the 20th century man confronted emptiness and doubts about:
• the existence of God
• the primacy of the human race in creation
• the supremacy of reason in human affairs
• the perception that life is self-evidently worth living
• the nature of reality
The 20th century, like the Victorian era, is a period characterized by the dizzying rapidity of change.
With the advent of air and space travel and the development of telecommunications, and with such sociological developments as the rise of multinational corporations and the growing equality of the sexes, the planet has truly become a Global Village.
The change that characterized the Victorian era was most prominently the concept of progress caused by the new industrialization.
By the modern era the erosion of the fundamental principles of science and religion begun in the 19th century had taken full effect. The fundamental modern change was massive disillusionment.
Most modern writers looked within themselves for a principle of order.
The literature of the 20th century has an overwhelming preoccupation with the self, the nature of consciousness, and the processes of perception. Literature is often subjective, and personal and internal.
Authors are concerned with the fragmentation of both experience and thought. Many employ stream-of-consciousness: the fluid, associational, often illogical, sequence of the ideas, feelings and impressions of a single mind as seen in the works of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
Genres overlap and disappear; we see the rise of metafiction, i.e., self-reflexive literature about literature.

Key Modern Novelists in World Literature
FRANZ KAKFA (1883-1924, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia
Noted for his surrealistic fiction such as the novella "The Metamorphosis" (1915, tr. 1948) and The Trial (1925, tr. 1937)
ERICH MARIE REMARQUE (1898-1970)
German journalist and novelist
Wrote All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), the best known and best example of World War I anti-war literature
THOMAS MANN (1875-1955)
German novelist and essayist, known for his narrative psychological studies of the artistic temperament and for his exploration of mythology.
Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927; he became an American citizen in 1944 after fleeing the Nazis.
Major Works:
• "Death in Venice" (1912), a novella
• The Magic Mountain (1924) a Bildungsroman set in a sanatorium
MARCEL PROUST (1871-1922)
French novelist whose works attempt to find the true meaning of past experience in involuntary memories stimulated by some object or circumstance
His masterwork is Recherche du Temps Perdu (literally, in search of lost time); English title Remembrance of Things Past) (16 volumes, 1913-27); includes Swann's Way
ANDRE MALREAUX (1901-76)
French novelist and critic who wrote novels of political and social involvement filled with pessimism about the destiny of Western man.
Man's Fate (1933), based on the Shanghai insurrection of 1927 in which Communists take over the city and are then rebuffed by former ally Chaing-Kai Shek
JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941)
Irish novelist, short story writer, and poet and practitioner of experimental narrative techniques.
Major Works:
• The Dubliners (1914), a short story collection
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916),largely autobiographical
• Ulysses (1921)
• Finnegan's Wake (1939)
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1935)
English novelist and essayist, whose fiction featured stream-of-consciousness technique
Major Works:
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• A Room of One's Own (1929) a book-length essay about a woman's need to find a space to do her own creative work
D.H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930) whose novels often glorified nature and featured frank sexuality.
Major Works:
• Sons and Lovers (1913), largely autobiographical
• Women in Love (1921)
• Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928) famously banned for its sex scenes.
WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)
American novelist and short story writer whose stories set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County of his home state of Mississippi chronicled the decline of the South after the Civil War.
Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949
Major Works:
• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• Light in August (1932)

Contemporary Literature (c. 1945--present)
Literature of the contemporary period is also often referred to as post-modern or neo-modern literature.
Even more than the Moderns, contemporary authors reflect pluralism. They are preoccupied with perception, fragmentation, the loss of belief in anything outside the self, pervasive irony.
Many experiment with metafiction, the preoccupation with the text itself.
The era immediately following the end of World War II (1945-1963) was dominated by an awareness of the Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Other key events of the era include the McCarthy hearings and Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation (1954) as well as the rise of the influence of television.
The recent past (1963--present) is marked by social unrest and political upheaval.
Domestic upheaval included
• race riots
• assassinations, assassination attempts
• protests against the Vietnam War
• the Stonewall Rebellion (1969) and the rise of the gay rights movement
• the feminist movement marked by the publication of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) and by the appearance of Ms. magazine (1972) as well as the widespread use of the birth control pill
• the Watergate Scandal culminating in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974
• the omnipresence of drugs and both soft and hard core pornography
• the decline of the family and rising divorce rates
• the AIDS epidemic
• 9/11/01 and the war on terrorism
Television is touted as a reason for the decline in national literacy
Novelist Bernard Malamud declared that no one knows how to tell a story anymore.
More and more fiction features the anti-hero, alternately a victim, a rebel, or a bumbling failure.
Surrealism and black comedy become more popular.

Key Contemporary Movements and Novelists in World Literature
There is a strong resurgence of realistic writing, often in support of social change:
• Nadine Gordimer and playwright Athol Fugard in South Africa
• James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison on racism
• Alice Walker and Toni Morrison on racism and sexism
• Alexander Solzhenitzen on Stalinism
• Elie Wiesel on the Holocaust
• Salman Rushdie on Islam
• Yukio Mishima on Japanese imperialism
Other American realists of note include:
• John Updike (b. 1932). author of Rabbit, Run (1960) and several sequels
• John Cheever (1912-82 whose The Wapshot Chronicles (1957) portrayed life in the suburbs
• Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
• Bobbie Ann Mason (b. 1940), a K-Mart realist whose works such as In Country (1985) relate the drab experiences of the lower middle class
American regionalists include:
• Larry McMurtry ( Texas)
o Lonesome Dove
o Terms of Endearment
• Anne Tyler ( Baltimore)
o The Accidental Tourist
o Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
• Gail Godwin ( North Carolina)
o A Mother and Two Daughters
• Pat Conroy (South Carolina)
o The Lords of Discipline
o The Prince of Tides
Jewish literature in the United States portrayed the dilemmas of misfit heroes yearning for meaningful lives and moral regeneration
• Saul Bellow (1915-2005), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1976
o The Adventures of Augie March (1953), winner of the National Book Award
o Seize the Day (1956)
o Henderson the Rain King (1959)
o Herzog (1964)
o Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)
o Humboldt's Gift (1975), winner of Pulitzer Prize
• Philip Roth (b 1933)
o Goodbye, Columbus (1959), short stories that won the Pulitzer Prize
o Portnoy's Complaint
• Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
o The Assistant
o The Natural
o The Fixer
Writers in English whose work illuminates the Third World:
• Amy Tan (Chinese)
o The Joy Luck Club (1989)
• Sandra Cisneros (Hispanic) winner of a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation
• Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) (Native American)
o Love Medicine (1984), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
o The Beet Queen
• Bharati Mukherjee (Indian)
o Jasmine (1989)
Experimentalists in the United States include:
• William Burroughs
o Naked Lunch (1959)
• Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)
o V. (1963)
o The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
o Gravity's Rainbow (1972)
• John Barth (b. 1930)
o Lost in the Funhouse (1968)
American feminists include:
• Erica Jong
o Fear of Flying
Other major modern literary writers in the United States include:
• Jane Smiley
o A Thousand Acres
• Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
o The Bluest Eye (1970)
o Song of Solomon (1977)
o Beloved (1987)
• Alice Walker (b. 1944)
o The Color Purple (1982)
o In Search of Our Mother's Garden (1982), "womanist" prose
The latter half of the 20th century in the United States also saw the rise of the nonfiction novel and the New Journalism
• John Hersey
o Hiroshima (1946)
• Truman Capote
o In Cold Blood (1966)
• William Styron
o The Confessions of Nat Turner
• E. L. Doctorow
o Daniel's Song (1971), about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
• Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
o The Executioner's Song (1979), about Gary Gilmore who refused to challenge his execution
• Alex Haley
o Roots
• Tom Wolfe
o The Right Stuff, about the Mercury 7 astronauts
Another trend in contemporary fiction is the rise of serious fantasy, especially as it is embodied in magical realism--the concept that encompasses both the events of everyday life and the dimensions of the imagination.
The leading magical realist is Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

• Magical Realism • Metafiction • The Graphic Novel •
The term postmodernism implies a movement away from and perhaps a reaction against modernism. Both terms are often used to describe a broad spectrum of attitudes and broad approaches to the novel. Some Definitions of Terms
In general premodernism assumes that man is ruled by authority (e.g., the Catholic Church) and tradition.
With modernism, influenced by humanism and the Enlightenment, man rejects tradition and authority in favor of a reliance on reason and on scientific discovery.
Postmodernism stretches and breaks away from the idea that man can achieve understanding through a reliance on reason and science.
Discoveries such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle, and the weird behavior of particles in quantum physics convey the belief that the universe cannot be explained by reason alone.
Modernism, with its belief in the primacy of human reason, values realism in fiction and logical narrative structures. Mary Klage says:
Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the better [i.e., the more rationally]. . .it will function.
In Modernist Fiction Randall Stevenson says:
Postmodernism extends modernist uncertainty, often by assuming that reality, if it exists at all, is unknowable or inaccessible through a language grown detached from it.
Characteristics of Postmodernism in Fiction
Postmodernist fiction is generally marked by one or more of the following characteristics:
• playfulness with language
• experimentation in the form of the novel
o less reliance on traditional narrative form
o less reliance on traditional character development
o experimentation with point of view
• experimentation with the way time is conveyed in the novel
• mixture of "high art" and popular culture
• interest in metafiction, that is, fiction about the nature of fiction
Sources and Further Reading Keep, Christopher, Tim McLaughlin and Robin Parmar. "Defining Postmodernism." The Electronic Labyrinth Keep, Christopher, Tim McLaughlin and Robin Parmar. "Postmodernism and the Postmodern Novel." The Electronic Labyrinth Klages, Mary. Postmodernism Smethurst, Paul. Overview: Characteristic Postmodernist Stances Smethurst, Paul. Overview: The Shift from Modernism to Postmodernism