A Timeline of the Development of the Novel
(based on: The Hutchinson Multimedia Encyclopedia, 1994)
extended fictional prose narrative, often including some sense of the psychological development of
the central characters and of their relationship with a broader world. The modern novel took its
name and inspiration from the Italian novella, the short tale of varied character which became
popular in the late 13th century. As the main form of narrative fiction in the 20th century, the novel
is frequently classified according to genres and subgenres such as the historical novel, detective
fiction, fantasy, and science fiction.
The European novel is said to have originated in Greece in the 2nd century BC. Ancient Greek
examples include the Daphnis and Chloë of Longus; almost the only surviving Latin work that could
be called a novel is the Golden Ass of Apuleius (late 2nd century), based on a Greek model. There
is a similar, but until the 19th century independent, tradition of prose narrative including
psychological development in the Far East, notably in Japan, with for example The Tale of Genji by
Murasaki Shikibu. The works of the Italian writers Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello (1485-1561)
were translated into English in such collections as William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure 1566-67,
and inspired the Elizabethan novelists, including John Lyly, Philip Sidney, Thomas Nash, and
Thomas Lodge. In Spain, Cervantes’ Don Quixote 1604 contributed to the development of the
novel through its translation into other European languages, but the 17th century was dominated by
the French romances of Gauthier de Costes de La Calprenède (1614-1663) and Madelaine de
Scudéry (1607-1691), although William Congreve and Aphra Behn continued the English tradition.
British novel In the 18th century the realistic novel was established in England by the work of
Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett. Horace
Walpole, and later Mary Shelley, developed the Gothic novel. In the early 19th century Sir Walter
Scott developed the historical novel, and Jane Austen wrote ‘novels of manners’. Celebrated
novelists of the Victorian age in Britain were Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, the Brontës,
George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
The transition period from Victorian times to the 20th century includes George Meredith, Samuel
Butler, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, George
Moore, H G Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. Slightly later are W Somerset Maugham,
E M Forster, James Joyce, D H Lawrence, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Virginia Woolf- the last four
being especially influential in the development of novel technique. Among those who began writing
in the 1920s are J B Priestley, Richard Hughes, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Graham
Greene, V S Pritchett, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, and Rosamund Lehmann.
The 1930s produced Nigel Balchin, Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell, and George Orwell, and more
recent British writers include Anthony Powell, John Fowles, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Iris
Murdoch, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, and Martin Amis.
US novel
The 19th century was also a great period for the novel in the USA, with James Fenimore Cooper,
Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.
From the end of the 19th century the USA produced novelists in such schools as Realism (Edith
Wharton, Stephen Crane, William Howells, and Willer Cather) and Naturalism/social protest
(Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Jack London). Before World War II, Edna
Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Thomas
Wolfe, and William Faulkner had made names for themselves; many of them continued to enjoy
success after the war.
After World War II a new generation of US novelists reached maturity, with many of them crossing
into poetry and short stories as well. This group included Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Robert
Warren, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Porter, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor,
J D Salinger, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Joyce Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, and John
Updike.
Great European novelists of the 19th century were Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre
Dumas (both father and son), George Sand, and Emile Zola in France; Goethe and Jean Paul in
Germany; and Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy in Russia.
Twentieth-century European novelists include Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka,
Ernst Wiechert, Stefan Zweig, Christa Wolff, Heinrich Böll, and Gunter Grass (Germany); André
Gide, Marcel Proust, Jules Romains, François Mauriac, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, and Alain
Robbe-Grillet (France); Gabriele d’Annunzio, Ignazio Silone, Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Primo
Levi, and Natalia Ginzburg (Italy); Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Aleksei Tolstoi, Boris
Pasternak, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Russia); Arturo Baréa, Pío Baroja, and Ramón Pérez de
Ayala (Spain).
In Latin America 20th-century novelists include Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel
García Márquez; in Canada they include Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler,
and Margaret Atwood; and in Australia Henry Handel Richardson and Patrick White.