Prose Genres
Most common genres of prose are the short story, the novella, and the novel.
The Novella
Also prose narrative. It differs from the short story as well as the novel in length—being a
kind of middle distance—but more importantly in substance.
The general characteristics of the novella show this difference:
1. unlike the short story, it has a epic quality;
2. unlike the novel, it is restricted to a single event, situation or conflict;
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concentrates on this single event and shows it as a conflict;
the event has an unexpected turning point so that the conclusion surprises even
while it is the logical outcome;
3. it may contain a concrete symbol which is the heart of the narrative.
Good examples: The Old Man and the Sea, Animal Farm, Heart of Darkness
The Novel
The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which suggests its closeness
to the medieval romance. The English name is derived from the Italian novella, meaning "a
little new thing." or "a tale, a piece of news”.
Term now applied to a wide variety of writing. The common element of all definitions and all subgenres is that it is an extended piece of prose fiction. What does "extended" mean?
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Length of novels varies greatly
debate over whether a novel is not a novel but a long short story, or a novella, is
almost endless and pointless.
The novel must be a form of story, or prose narrative, containing characters, action
(happenings), and, perhaps, a plot. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a story without characters
or plot.
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If there is no 'plot' (a unified program of action with a beginning, a middle, and an
end; with conflict, complications, resolutions, etc.) as readers we would probably
create one, since we want to know "what happened".
It is nearly impossible to find a story without characters. Someone (animal, human, or
mechanical; real or imaginary) must "be" in the story. Thus plot and character are
almost inseparable.
The subject matter of the novel is difficult to classify. No other literary form has proved so
versatile, so adaptable to an almost infinite variety of topics and themes.
What makes novel new when it appears is its realistic treatment of life and manners. Its heroes
are men and women like ourselves, and its chief interest, as Northrop Frye said, is "human
character as it manifests itself in society."
Reasons for the Novel's Popularity can be connected to this.
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Popular because
o most closely represents the lives of the majority of people.
o its social scope expanded to include characters and stories about the middle and
working classes.
o readership included a large percentage of women and servants, so the novel
became the form which most addressed the domestic and social concerns of
these groups.
Sub-Genres of the Novel
During the development of the genre, a number of specialty novels, or sub-genres, have
developed. As with all genres, many of these over-lap. The most important, or at least the
most common, include:
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Romance: (actually the beginning of novels. The medieval romances are not raal
novels yet, as they depict an idealised courtly world and cliché characters.)
o must not be confused with the love story.
o It may be 'didactic,' but this is usually incidental.
o It is a European form which has been influenced by such collections as The
Arabian Knights.
o elements of fantasy, improbability, extravagance, and naivety.
o love, adventure, the marvellous and the "mythic".
o Often the word "romance" is used loosely to describe a narrative of heroic or
spectacular achievements, of chivalry, or gallant love, of deeds of "derringdo".
 Don Quixote, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Conrad's
Lord Jim.
Gothic novel:
o A type of romance which was very popular in the 18th century and at the
beginning of the 19th.
o Most were tales of mystery and horror, intended to chill the spine, curdle the
blood.
o strong element of the supernatural and the now-traditional "haunted house"
props.
o Settings are their distinguishing feature: medieval castles (or similar locations)
with secret passages, dungeons, winding stairways, a stupefying atmosphere of
doom and gloom, a proper complement of spooky happenings and,
occasionally, spectral visions.
o There is usually at least one mysterious character, and some kind of dark
secret.
 works of Poe, the Brontës, some of Dickens (Bleak House, Great
Expectations); Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Historical novel:
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reconstructs history and recreates it imaginatively
both historical and fictional characters may appear.
The author aims at verisimilitude (likeness to the truth, and therefore the
appearance of being true or real even when fantastic).
 works of Sir Walter Scott, and the "biographical" series on the United
States by Gore Vidal.
Picaresque:
o usually a first-person narrative
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the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt
society.
usually satirical. Through his experiences he satirizes his society.
originated in 16th century Spain and flourished throughout Europe in the 17th
and 18th centuries
o resembles the long, rambling romances of medieval chivalry, to which it
provided the first realistic counterpart.
 Defoe's Moll Flanders, and Smollett's Roderick Random.
Psychological novel:
o This is a vague term used to describe fiction concerned with the spiritual,
emotional, and mental lives of characters
o analysis of character rather than the plot and action.
Epistolary novel:
o novels in the form of letters
o especially popular in the 18th century
o Still now sometimes letters constitute part of a novel.
 Pamela, Humphrey Clinker.
Social or Thesis novel:
o treats a social, political, or religious problem with a didactic and, perhaps,
radical, purpose.
o It sets out to call attention to the shortcomings of society.
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, much of Dickens, The Grapes of Wrath, The Lord
of the Flies.
Documentary novel:
o based on such documentary evidence as newspaper articles, archives, legal
reports, and recent official papers;
o it is sometimes described as "instant fiction", or the contemporary 'historical
novel.'
 T. Dreiser's An American Tragedy was based on a sensational murder
of the time, as was T. Capote's In Cold Blood.
Bildungsroman: [German: 'formation novel']
o a novel which is the account of the youthful development of the hero or
heroine.
 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dickens, David
Copperfield are best known
The Künstlerroman
o shows the development of the artist from childhood to maturity and later.
Roman a clef [livre a clef, key novel, Schlüsselroman]:
o actual persons are presented under fictitious names. (Primary Colours)
Novel of manners:
o concerned primarily with social class and appropriate or inappropriate social
behaviour (manners).
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Typically it narrates the story of a female protagonist, a single woman who is
trying to find an appropriate husband.
o She meets several suitors in different social and economic situations. As she is
trying to make the right choice, the novel examines and compares the
characteristic ‘manners’ of each social position.
 Jane Austen’s and Henry James’s novels.
Anti-novels:
o This form tends to be experimental, and breaks with the traditional storytelling methods and form of the novel.
o Often there is not much attempt to create an illusion of realism or naturalism.
o It establishes its own conventions, a different kind of realism, and deters the
reader from identification with the characters
o lack of an obvious plot; diffused episode; minimal development of character;
detailed surface analysis of objects; many repetitions; innumerable
experiments with language (vocabulary and syntax), punctuation; variations in
time sequence; alternative endings or beginnings. Some extreme features
include detachable pages; pages which can be shuffled like cards; blank pages;
coloured pages; collage effects; drawings; hieroglyphics.
 The beginnings of this category are in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
(e.g. Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse), the early fiction of Samuel
Beckett, and the early work of Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy.
Fantasy novel:
o not primarily devoted to depicting realistic events, but aims at developing an
imaginary world.
 J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Ring trilogy and J.K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter series.
Science fiction:
o diverts into the realm of the possible or the probable,
o often investigating new technological possibilities, e.g. that of robots, time
travel or parallel universes.
 Gene Roddenbury’s Star Trek or Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy.
History and Development
Origins of the novel are ancient.
 In the XIIth Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom (ca. 1200 BC) Egyptians were writing
fiction of a kind we would consider novels. Also: ancient Greece and Rome.
 From c. 1st millennium, Japan similar works survive. (The most famous is the tale of
Genji — ca. 1000 — written by a woman. - a long story of court life and the
adventures of a Japanese Don Juan. It is important in the history of the novel because
it contains character analysis, and a study of the psychology of love.
 C. 10th century - collection of stories known as Arabian Nights or The Thousand and
One Nights was beginning. > established as a group of stories probably in the 14th 16th centuries, and became known in Europe in the 18th century. Great influence.
 Renaissance, Italy in the 14th century collections of stories were popular. Boccaccio's
Decameron > influ: Geoffrey Chaucer.
o Although these were short stories > forerunners of novel because they were in
prose, method of narration, creation and development of character
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Until the 14th century most of the literature of entertainment: narrative verse,
particularly the epic and the romance. {Romance eventually > roman, the term for
novel in most European languages
o The epic tells a traditional story and is an amalgam of myth, history, and
fiction. Its heroes are gods and goddesses and extraordinary men and women.
o The romance also tells stories of larger-than-life characters. It emphasizes
adventure and often involves a quest for an ideal or the pursuit of an enemy.
What distinguishes the novel from the romance is its realistic treatment of life
and manners. Its heroes are men and women like ourselves, and its chief
interest, as Northrop Frye said, is "human character as it manifests itself in
society."
novel is a descendant of the medieval romances (they were first written in verse, later
in prose). By end of the 17th century, verse narratives had been replaced by prose.
Spain was ahead of the rest of Europe in the development of the novel form.
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The greatest of Spanish novels, Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615),
first appears at the beginning of the 14th century. > Proto-typical picaresque novel,
satirized chivalry and a number of earlier novels. > written to deflate romantic or
idealized fictional forms. story of a madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric
romance, explores the role of illusion and reality in life
The only other works in Europe which could be called novels are the French
Gargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532), by Rabelais. These are 'novels' of fantasy
along the lines of Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1736), Candide (1759), and Zarathustra
(1883-91).
In England:
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novel is still in its infancy at the close of the 16th century; even in the 17th century
only Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1668) could be seen as a kind of allegorical novel.
Early in the 18th century Congreve published Incognita: or, Love and Duty Reconciled
(1713). He called it a novel, and in his preface he stated what he thought a novel is:
novels are of a more familiar nature (than romances). They "Come near us, and represent to
us Intrigues in Practice, delight us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly
unusual or unpresidented [sic], such which being not so distant from our Belief bring also the
pleasure nearer us. Romances give more wonder, Novels more Delight."
It was a product of an intellectual milieu shaped by the great 17th-century philosophers,
Descartes and Locke, who insisted upon the importance of individual experience. > They
believed that reality could be discovered by the individual through the senses. > Thus, the
novel emphasized specific, observed details. > It individualized its characters by locating
them precisely in time and space.
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Soon after this (1719) Defoe published Robinson Crusoe — the first in a long line of
desert island fictions. From now on the novel comes of age, and within another 70
years is a major and matured form. Then Moll Flanders (1722)
o Both are picaresque stories, in that each is a sequence of episodes held together
largely because they happen to one person. But the central character in both
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novels is so convincing and set in so solid and specific a world that Defoe is
often credited with being the first writer of "realistic" fiction.
The range and variety of novels, especially in the 18th century, are extraordinary:
romances, picaresques, satirical novels, philosophical novels, and the epistolary novel
(the use of the letter) all appear.
o important example: (1st "novel of character" or psychological novel, also an
epistolary one): Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740-41)> It is a work
characterized by the careful plotting of emotional states.
o Defoe and Richardson were the first great writers in our literature who did not
take their plots from mythology, history, legend, or previous literature. They
established the novel's claim as an authentic account of the actual experience
of individuals.
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19 century in England is the period of the novel. In the early years, Sir Walter Scott
established the historical novel, and Jane Austen the comedy of manners. The middle
years were astonishing for their output: Dickens, Trolloppe, Thackeray, George Eliot.
The 1840's belong to the Brontë sisters (Anne, Emily, Charlotte); the last quarter of
the century to Thomas Hardy.
Turn of the century: Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence. In the 20th century, the
novel remained strong, and showed constant innovation.
o In 1915 Dorothy Richardson was the first English novelist to introduce the
stream of consciousness technique; in 1916 the Irishman James Joyce (A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) made the technique more famous. In
Ulysses (1922) and in Finnegan's Wake (1939) he perfected this technique.
Stream of Consciousness
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between the two world wars
Influenced by developments in modern psychology,
attempting to re-create the natural flow of a character's thoughts.
o People's thoughts do not usually flow in a neat, organized manner. Instead,
they usually proceed in an unorganised flow of insights, memories, flashbacks,
and reflections. random movement and natural flow of a character's thoughts,
natural associations
named by the American psychologist William James, who wrote: "Consciousness . . .
does not appear to itself chopped up in bits . . . . A 'river' or a 'stream' are the
metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call
it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life."
Use of omniscient narrators abandoned in favour of first-person and third-person
limited narrators. They also generally used a limited point of view in their works
because they believed that reality is shaped by people's perceptions. Writers also
frequently attempted to convey a sense of uncertainty by using a narrator who lacks an
understanding or awareness of the nature of human existence.
After Joyce the novel was never quite the same. His influence was profound. Virginia
Woolf, in the 1920s and 1930s extended this technique even further. She was also one
of the great innovators.