The rise of the novel

Prof.ssa Cynthia Tenaglia

WHY NOVEL?

• From Novelty

• Individual vision of Reality.

• Truth is an individual experience ,always unique and new

REALISM

• It tries to portray all the varieties of human experience

• Descartes and Locke insisted upon the importance of individual experience.

• They believed that reality could be discovered by the individual through the senses

The increase of the reading public in the Augustan Age was due to

the growing importance

of the middle class

the individual’s trust in his own

abilities

the practice of reason and self-analysis

Most readers were middle-class women

They used to borrow books from circulating libraries

The rise of the novel

•Coffee Houses•Journals

The rise of periodical essays• they had a great influence on the novel.• In the first 15 years of the 18th c. writers as

Steele and Addison included many character-sketches in their essays, as well as descriptions and discussions of the social scene. In their sketches they mixed descriptions and narrative with the kind of witty dialogue and sense of drama that had characterized the Restoration Comedies.

• The spokesman of the middle class.

The novelist

• The fathers of the English novel:

• Daniel Defoe the realistic novel

• Samuel Richardson the sentimental novel

• Henry Fielding the mock-epic novel

• Jonathan Swift the satirical novel

• To be understood widely he wrote in a simple polished and elegant way.

The novelist’s aim

• Realism not only linked to the life presented, but to the way it was shown.

• Speed and copiousness his most important economic virtues since it was the bookseller and not the patron who rewarded him.

The Plot

• the social structures of everyday life

1. Real life

Themes

2. Everything that could affect social status

3. The sense of reward and punishment linked to the Puritan

ethics of the middle class

The Hero

Is a particular human type , no more a general

human type

The mouthpiece of the author

• struggle for survival or social success• believe in reason

All the characters

•have contemporary names and surnames•located precisely in time and space.

The reader is expected to sympathise with him

The characters

A bourgeois, self-made, self-reliant man

TIME

No more timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities

Precise time No more restriction in the time of tragedy

to 24 hours ( the celebrated UNITY OF TIME)

PAST EXPERIENCES ARE THE CAUSE OF PRESENT ACTIONS

• Chronological sequence of events

The setting

• References to particular times of the year or of the day

“I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York”

(Robinson Crusoe)

• Specific names of towns and streets

• Detailed descriptions of interiors to make the narrative more realistic

1ST-PERSON NARRATOR

3RD-PERSON NARRATOR

PATTERN

• Daniel Defoe

• Jonathan Swift

Fictional autobiographies

• Samuel Richardson

Letters exchanged between the main characters

• Henry Fielding The mock-epic style

The narrative technique