had been recited to a select audiences, though this was a more intimate experience

than the performance of plays in theaters. The late medieval commercial

manuscript production created a market of private books, but it still required the
customer to contact the professional copyist with the book a person wanted to have
copied, a situation that restricted the development of a more private reading
experience. The invention of the printing press, in the 15th century, however, totally
altered the situation.

A new world of Individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret

anxieties, "conduct" and "gallantry" spread with novels and the associated proseromance. Love also became a major subject for novels. Pierre Huet, in an early
definition of the novel, or romance, noted: "I call them Fictions, to discriminate them
from True Histories; and I add, of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the
Principal Subject of Romance."[10] The reader is invited to personally identify
emotionally with a novel's characters, whereas historians aim ideally at objectivity.

Length[edit]
See also: List of longest novels
The novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the
novella, short story, and flash fiction. However, in the 17th century critics saw the
romance as of epic length and the novel as its short rival. A precise definition of the
differences in length between these types of fiction, is, however, not possible.

The length of a novel can still be important because most literary awards use length
as a criterion in the ranking system.[note 2] The Booker Prize in 2007 created a
serious debate with its short-listing of Ian McEwan's 166-page work On Chesil
Beach, with some critics stating that McEwan had at best written a novella.[note 3]

The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that a
novel should encompass the "totality of life."[12]

Early forerunners[edit]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this
article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed. (March 2014)

Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the
early 11th century, 17th-century depiction
Although early forms of the novel are to be found in a number of places, including
classical Rome, 10th and 11th-century Japan, and Elizabethan England, the
European novel is often said to have begun with Don Quixote in 1605.[13]

Early works of extended fictional prose, or novels, include works in Latin like the
Satyricon by Petronius (c. 50 AD), and The Golden Ass by Apuleius (c. 150 AD),
works in Sanskrit such as the 6th or 7th-century Daakumracarita by Dain, and
in the 7th-century Kadambari by Banabhatta, the 11th-century Japanese Tale of
Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, the 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (or Philosophus
Autodidactus, the 17th-century Latin title) by Ibn Tufail, who wrote in Arabic, the
13th-century Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, another Arabic novelist, and in
Chinese in the 14th-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong.

Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji (1010) has been described as the world's first
novel[14][15] and shows essentially all the qualities for which Marie de La Fayette's
novel La Princesse de Clves (1678) has been praised: individuality of perception,
an interest in character development, and psychological observation.[16]
Urbanization and the spread of printed books in Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD) China
led to the evolution of oral storytelling into consciously fictional novels by the Ming
dynasty (13681644 AD). Parallel European developments did not occur for
centuries, and awaited the time when the availability of paper allowed for similar
opportunities.

By contrast, Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus
are works of didactic philosophy and theology. In this sense, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
would be considered an early example of a philosophical novel,[17][18] while
Theologus Autodidactus would be considered an early theological novel.[19] Hayy
ibn Yaqdhan, with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island, is also likely
to have influenced Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), because the work was
available in an English edition in 1711.[20]

Epic poetry exhibits some similarities with the novel, and the Western tradition of
the novel reaches back into the field of verse epics, though again not in an
unbroken tradition. The epics of Asia, such as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh
(13001000 BC), and Indian epics such as the Ramayana (400 BCE and 200 CE), and
Mahabharata (4th century BC) were as unknown in early modern Europe as was the
Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf (c.7501000 AD), which was rediscovered in the late
18th century and early 19th century. Other non-European works, such as the Torah,
the Koran, and the Bible, are full of stories, and thus have also had a significant
influence on the development of prose narratives, and therefore the novel. Classical
Greek epics like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (9th or 8th century BC), and those of
Ancient Rome, such as Virgil's Aeneid (2919 BC), were re-discovered by Western
scholars in the Middle Ages. Then at the beginning of the 18th century, French prose
translations brought Homer's works to a wider public, who accepted them as
forerunners of the novel. [note 4]

Classical Greek and Roman prose narratives [note 5] included a didactic strand, with
the philosopher Plato's (c.425-c.348 BC) dialogues; a satirical dimension with
Petronius' Satyricon; the incredible stories of Lucian of Samosata; and Lucius
Apuleius' proto-picaresque The Golden Ass, as well as the heroic romances of the
Greeks Heliodorus and Longus. Longus is the author of the famous Greek novel,
Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century A.D.).

Medieval period 11001500[edit]

Romances[edit]
Main article: Chivalric romance

Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted
in the tradition of medieval "romances". Even today, most European languages
make that clear by using the word roman roughly the way that English uses the
word novel, which claims roots in the Italian novella.[21] Yet, epic length or the
focus on a central hero giving the work its name (as in Robinson Crusoe or Oliver
Twist) are features derived from the tradition of "romances". The early modern novel
had preferred titles that focused on curious examples of modern life, not on heroes.

The word roman or romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of
the 13th century, as in the Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), famous today in English
through Geoffrey Chaucer's late-14th-century translation. The term linked fictions
back to the histories that had appeared in the Romance language of 11th- and 12thcentury southern France. The central subject matter was initially derived from
Roman and Greek historians. Works of the Chanson de geste tradition revived the
memory of ancient Thebes, Dido and Aeneas, and Alexander the Great. German and
Dutch adaptations of the famous histories appeared in the late 12th century and
early 13th century.[22] Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (138087) is a late example
of this European fashion.

The subject matter which was to become the central theme of the genre in the 16th
and 17th centuries was initially a branch of a broader genre. Arthurian histories
became a fashion in the late 12th century, thanks to their ability to glorify the
northern European feudal system as an independent cultural achievement. The
works of Chrtien de Troyes set an example, in that his plot construction subjected
the northern European epic traditions to ancient Greek aesthetics. The typical
Arthurian romance would focus on a single hero and lead him into a double course
of episodes[note 6] in which he would prove both his prowess as an independent
knight and his readiness to function as a perfect courtier under King Arthur. The
model invited religious redefinitions with the quest and the adventure as basic plot
elements: the quest was a mission the knight would accept as his personal task and
problem. Adventures (from Latin advenire "coming towards you") were tests sent by
God to the knight on the journey, whose course he (the knight) would no longer try
to control. The plot framework survived into the world of modern Hollywood movies
which still unite, separate and reunite lovers in the course of adventures designed
to prove their love and value. Variations kept the genre alive: unexpected and
peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight (c. 1380). Satirical parodies of knight errantry (and contemporary
politics) appeared with works such as Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring (c. 1410).

The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century. The Prose Lancelot
or Vulgate Cycle includes passages of that period. The collection indirectly lead to
Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur compilation of the early 1470s.

Certain factors made prose increasingly attractive: it linked the popular plots to the
field of serious histories traditionally composed in prose (compilations such as
Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur claimed to collect historical sources for the sole purpose
of instruction and national edification).[23] Prose had an additional advantage for
translation, because verse could only be translated by skilled poets.

Prose became the medium of the urban commercial book market in the 15th
century. Monasteries sold edifying collections of saints' and virgins' lives composed
in prose. The customers were mostly women (the interiors of many of the 14th- and
15th-century paintings of the Annunciation show how far books had spread into the
urban households that painters usually depicted as the Blessed Virgin's bourgeois
environment.[24]) Prose became in this environment the medium of silent and
private reading. It spread with the commercial book market that began to provide
such reading materials even before the arrival of the first commercial printed
histories in the 1470s.[note 7]

The novella[edit]
Main article: Novella

The Pilgrims diverting each other with tales; woodcut from Caxton's 1486 edition of
Canterbury Tales.
The term novel refers back to the production of short stories that remained part of a
European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes,
little funny stories designed to make a point in a conversation, the exemplum a
priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such
stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of
examples designed for the use of clerics to such poetic cycles as Boccaccio's
Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (13861400).

The early modern genre conflict between "novels" and "romances" can be traced
back to the 14th-century cycles. The standard scheme of stories the author claimed
to have heard in a round of narrators promised variety of subject matter and it led
to clashes of genres. Short romances appeared within the frame tales side by side
with stories of the rival lower genres such as the fabliaux.[note 8] Individual story
tellers would openly defend their tastes in a debate that grew into a metafictional
consideration.

The cycles themselves showed advantages over the production of rival extended
epic-length romances. Romances presupposed a consensus in questions of style and
heroism. The cycles shifted the problem of how fictions were to be justified onto the

level of the individual storytellers: onto a level the author, Chaucer or Boccaccio,
would see as out of his control.[25] The narrators had, so Chaucer in his Canterbury
Tales[26] offered these stories to make certain points in a lively conversation he had
only chronicled. They attacked each other if they felt the stories of their opponents
had missed their points. A competition among the genres developed. If one believes
the medieval collections, differing tastes of people with different social statuses
were decisive; the different professions fought a battle over precedent with satirical
plots designed to ridicule individuals of the opposing trades. A cycle bound rival
stories together and it offered the easiest way to keep a critical distance. The
pluralistic discourse created here eventually developed into the 17th- and 18thcentury debate of fiction and its genres.

Much of this original conception of the genre is still alive whenever a short joke is
told to make a certain humorous point in everyday conversation. The longer exploits
left the sphere of oral traditions with the arrival of the printing press. The book
eventually replaced the story teller and introduced the preface and the dedication
as the paratexts in which the authors would continue the metafictional debate over
the advantages of genres and the reasons why one published and read fictional
stories.

Renaissance period: 1500-1700[edit]

1474: The customer in the copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This
illustration of the first printed German Melusine looked back to the market of
manuscripts.
The modern distinction between history and fiction did not exist at this time and the
grossest improbabilities pervade many historical accounts found in the early
modern print market. William Caxton's 1485 edition of Thomas Malory's Le Morte
d'Arthur (1471) was sold as a true history, though the story unfolded in a series of
magical incidents and historical improbabilities. Sir John Mandeville's Voyages,
written in the 14th century, but circulated in printed editions throughout the 18th
century,[27] was filled with natural wonders, which were accepted as fact, like the
one-footed Ethiopians who use their extremity as an umbrella against the desert
sun. Both works eventually came to be viewed as works of fiction.

In the 16th and 17th centuries two factors led to the separation of history and
fiction. The invention of printing immediately created a new market of
comparatively cheap entertainment and knowledge in the form of chapbooks. The

more elegant production of this genre by 17th- and 18th-century authors were
belles lettres; that is a market that would be neither low nor academic. The second
major development was the first best-seller of modern fiction, the Spanish Amadis
de Gaula, by Garca Montalvo. However, it was not accepted as an example of belles
lettres. The Amadis eventually became the archetypical romance, in contrast with
the modern novel which began to be developed in the 17th century.

Chapbooks[edit]
Main article: Chapbook
The invention of printing led to the commercialization of histories, whether allegedly
true or works of fiction. Romances had circulated, prior to this time, in lavishly
ornamented manuscripts to be read to an audience. The invention of the printed
book created a comparatively inexpensive alternative for the special purpose of
silent reading. The principal historical subject matter of chapbooks was
abridgements of ancient historians, popular medieval histories of knights, stories of
comical heroes, religious legends, and collections of jests and fables.[28] The new
printed books reached the households of urban citizens and country merchants who
visited the cities as traders.

Deteriorated design: early-18th-century chapbook edition of The Honour of Chivalry,

first published in 1598.
Literacy spread among the urban populations of Europe due to a number of factors:
[29] Women of wealthier households had learned to read in the 14th and 15th
centuries and had become consumers of works of religious devotion; secondly the
Protestant Reformation enkindled propaganda and press wars that lasted into the
18th century; finally Broadsheets and newspapers became the new media of public
information.

Paralleling this expansion in reading, writing skills spread among apprentices and
women of the middle classes. Business owners were forced to adopt methods of
written book-keeping and accounting. The personal letter became a favourite
medium of communication among better-off 17th-century men and women.

Cheap printed histories were, in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially popular
among apprentices and younger urban readers of both sexes.[30] Norris' and

Bettesworth's 1719 edition of The Seven Famous Champions of Christendom ended

with a look at the entire spectrum of books the publishers would provide in their
shops on London Bridge:

At the afore-mentioned Place, all Country Chapmen may be furnished with all Sorts
of Bibles, Commonprayers, Testaments, Psalters, Primers and Horn-books; Likewise
all Sorts of three Sheets Histories, Penny Histories, and Sermons; and Choice of new
and old Ballads, at reasonable Rates.[31]

Franois Rabelais Gargantua (1537).

This new market for books was disregarded by scholars. The texts were offered with
promises of great erudition to an audience that did not know the difference between
erudition and the misleading advertisement. The subject matter was extremely
conservative, and the bestsellers of this marketbooks such as Till Eulenspiegel,
The Seven Wise Masters, Don Belianis of Greece, Dr. Faustus, The London Prentice,
and Sir John Mandeville's Voyageswent through innumerable editions between
1500 and 1800. People bought these books because everyone had heard of them.

The design of these chapbooks deteriorated and texts were copied with little
editing. Standard woodcut illustrations were repeated, often even within a single
book, wherever the plot allowed such repetition. The illustrations began to show
peculiar style mixes as the printer's stocks grew: early-18th-century editions of
16th-century titles would mix woodcuts of 16th-century knights in armor with
equally crude depictions of 18th-century courtiers wearing wigs.

The early modern market, from the 1530s and 1540s, divided into low chapbooks
and high market expensive, fashionable, elegant belles lettres. The Amadis and
Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel were important publications with respect to this
divide. Both books specifically addressed the new customers of popular histories,
rather than readers of belles lettres. The Amadis was a multivolume fictional
history of style, that aroused a debate about style and elegance as it became the
first best-seller of popular fiction. On the other hand Gargantua and Pantagruel,
while it adopted the form of modern popular history, in fact satirized that genre's
stylistic achievements. The division, between low and high literature, became
especially visible with books that appeared on both the popular and belles lettres
markets in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries: low chapbooks included

abridgments of books such as Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605/1615)[note 9]

and a mutilated editions of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), which infuriated
the author with their claim to offer the entire plot without the tedious reflections for
but half the price.[note 10]

The cheap abridgments openly addressed an audience that did not have the money
to buy books with engravings and fine print. The prefaces of the abridgements
promised shorter sentences, more action and less reflection, at half the cost.[note
11] The gradual differentiation between fact and fiction that affected the market of
the belles lettres in the 17th and 18th centuries barely touched this chapbook
market.

Romances[edit]
Heroic romances[edit]

The Amadis, Spanish edition of 1533

By the 1550s there existed a section of literature (scientific books) addressing the
academic audience and a second market of books for the wider audience. The
popular second market developed its own differentiation of class and style. While
the lowest strata of chapbooks created an extremely conservative market, its
antagonist, the elegant "belles lettres", showed a particular design aiming at
educated readers of both sexes, though not necessarily at academics. The very
term "belles lettres" spoke of the ambition to leave the field of low books and to
reach the realm of the sciences, "literature", "les lettres". Polite literature, galante
Wissenschaften (that is sciences addressing both sexes and all readers of taste)
were the English and German terminological equivalents. The use of French loan
words (belles lettres) marked the international aspect of the development. The new
market segment comprised poetry, memoirs, modern politics, books of fashion,
journals, and the like. Autobiographical memoirs, personal journals and prose fiction
set the trend in the modern field as the genres that authors could most freely use
for experiments of style and personal expression.

Madeleine de Scudry, Artamene (1654)

The evolution of prose fiction needed the elegant market, a market of changing
styles and fashions, and it found its central critical debate with the publication of

the Amadis de Gaula in the 1530s. Two questions moved into the centre of the
debate as Spanish, French and German translations and imitations flooded the
European market.[32] The first was a question of style and fashion: the Amadis had
moved back into the Arthurian Middle Ages, into a world of quests, knights and
adventures, though it had turned its princes and princesses into paragons of style
and elegance. Was this what one had to expect of modern prose fiction? The second
problem was connected with the unprecedented public reaction: the Amadis
became the object of a widespread reading craze. Could a market of style and
distinguished taste allow such a development?

By 1600 the Amadis had become the detested epitome of the modern romance. A
search for alternative subject matters had begun. The biographies of Greek and
Roman historians became the most important source here. Heliodorus' romances
were to be followed in matters of style and composition,[note 12] while the heroes
turned from knights to princes and princesses acting now in ancient courts. The
standard plot of adventures gave way to a new plot of love facing intrigues, attacks,
rivalry and adversity. A new art of character observation unfolded.

The works that gained the greatest fameHonor d'Urf's L'Astre (160727), John
Barclay's Argenis (162526), Madeleine de Scudry's Clelie, and Anton Ulrich von
Braunschweig's Rmischer Octavia (Octavia the Roman, 16791714)were
esteemed both as explorations of the ancient world and as works one would read
with an interest in modern life. They present contemporary events set in ancient
times and are examples of roman clef (readers would decipher with the aid of a
key who was who within this fictional world). The contemporary fashions of courtly
conduct could be found nowhere in such perfection as in these seemingly historical
romances, and readers used them as models for their own elegant compliments,
letters, and speeches. The genre had much in common with the production of
French and Italian operas of the same period. It created a special brand of escapist
"Asian" Romances set in the ancient empires of Assyria, Persia, and India. These
novels were particularly fashionable among urban female French and German
readers of the younger generation, who would dream of sharing the lives and
adversities of exotic princesses. The individual European markets reacted differently
on these fashions. The fashion had a particularly short life in England where it
began in the 1650s only to end in the 1670s, as these romantic plots fell out of
fashion.

Satirical romances[edit]

Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665)

Stories of witty cheats were an integral part of the European novella with its
tradition of fabliaux. Several collections knitted such stories to individual heroes
who developed personal and national features. Germany's Till Eulenspiegel (1510)
was the hero of chapbooks in and outside Germany. The Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes
(1554) represented a transition from a collection of episodes towards the story of
the life of a central character, the hero of the work. Grimmelshausen's
Simplicissimus Teutsch (16661668) took a further step along this path, as its hero
experienced recent world history, in this case the history of the Thirty Years' War
that had devastated Germany. Richard Head's The English Rogue (1665) is rooted in
this tradition (the English preface mentions the precedents; the German translation
that appeared in 1672 sold the book as an English equivalent of the German
Simplicissimus). The tradition that developed with these titles focused on a hero and
his life. The adventures led to satirical encounters with the real world with the hero
either becoming the pitiable victim or the rogue who exploited the vices of those he
met.

A second tradition of satirical romances can be traced back to Heinrich Wittenwiler's

Ring (c. 1410) and to Franois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (15321564). It
was rather designed to parody and satirize heroic romances, and did this mostly by
dragging them into the low realm of the burlesque. Cervantes' Don Quixote
(1606/1615) modified the satire of romances: its hero lost contact with reality by
reading too many romances in the Amadisian tradition.

Both branches of satirical production seem to have addressed a predominantly male

audience (women are despicable victims in works such as Head's The English
Rogue). They found the appreciation of critics as long as they revealed the
weaknesses of the Amadis. The critics otherwise deplored that the satires could not
offer alternatives. Other important works of the tradition are Paul Scarron's Roman
Comique (165157) with its explicit discussions of the market of fictions, the
anonymous French Rozelli with its satire on Europe's religions, Alain-Ren Lesage's
Gil Blas (17151735), Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749),
and Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist (1773, printed posthumously in 1796).[33]

Dubious and scandalous histories[edit]

1719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe

The entire market of early modern fiction remained part of the wider production of
(potentially dubious) histories. A market of literature in the modern sense of the
word, a separate market for fiction and poetry, did not exist, because all books were
sold under the rubric of "History and politicks" in the early 18th century: pamphlets,
memoirs, travel literature, political analysis, serious histories, romances, poetry,
and novels.

That fictional histories could share the same space with academic histories and
modern journalism had been criticized by historians since the end of the Middle
Ages: fictions were "lies" and therefore hardly justifiable at all. The climate had,
however, changed in the 1670s. Paradoxically, the same historians who pleaded for
a new era of academic research also pleaded for fiction to stay within the field of
histories. The authors who advocated Pyrrhonism, scepticism as a historical
discipline, did not demand that fictions change. Instead, they demanded that
historians should step from the old project of historical narratives to a new project of
critical analysis and discussion of sources.[34] Pierre Bayle exemplified this with all
the articles of his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697) and with his statements
on the legitimacy of fictions, especially those of the modern political market.[35]

The new novels, romances, and dubious histories, the quasihistorical works of
Madame d'Aulnoy, Csar Vichard de Saint-Ral,[36] Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras,
[37] and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, were, according to the modern advocates
of the free press, not only embedded in the field of veritable critical histories: they
had an important function to fulfill in that field. In a time when factuality was not a
sufficient defence against a libel suit, the romantic layout allowed the publication of
histories that could not risk an unambiguous assertion of their truth. The question
was not whether one should separate the markets of true and fictional histories
from each other, but whether one would be able to establish critical discourses to
evaluate all the interesting production.

The literary market-place of the late 17th and early 18th century employed a simple
pattern of options of how fictions could both be part of the historical production and
reach out into the sphere of true histories. They allowed its authors to claim they
had published fiction, not truth, if they ever faced outright allegations of libel.

Romances of adventures: the title pages of both the English edition of Franois
Fnelon's Telemachus (London: E. Curll, 1715) and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
(London: W. Taylor, 1719).
Prefaces and title pages of 17th and early 18th-century fiction acknowledged this
pattern: histories could claim to be romances, but threaten to relate true events, as
in the Roman clef. Other works could, conversely, claim to be factual histories, yet
earn the suspicion that they were wholly invented. A further differentiation was
made between private and public history: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was,
within this pattern, neither a "romance" nor a "novel". It smelledwith its title page
alluding to Fnelon's Telemachus (1699/1700)of romance, yet the preface stated
that it should most certainly be read a true private history:

IF ever the Story of any private Man's Adventures in the World were worth making
Pvblick, and were acceptable when Publish'd, the Editor of this Account thinks this
will be so.
The Wonders of this Man's Life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant;
the Life of one Man being scarce capable of a greater Variety.
The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application
of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always ap[p]ly them (viz.) to the Instruction
of others by this Example, and to justify and honor the Wisdom of Providence in all
the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will.

The Editor[38] believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any
Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are
dispatch'd,[39] that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the
Instruction of the Reader, will be the same;[note 13] and as such he thinks, without
farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.
[40]
Delarivier Manley, under interrogation after the publication of her scandalous
Atalantis (1709), replied that she had written a work of sheer romance, a fairy tale
located on the famous fictional island. If the ruling Whigs wanted to prove that all
her stories matched a scandalous truth of their own actions, they might venture a
libel case. The author was released and continued her insinuations with three more
volumes of proclaimed romance published during the next two years.[41]

While journalists continued to defend the dubious production (relying on the

enlightened audience's ability to read with the necessary grain of skepticism if not
with amusement), the defenders of public morals demanded an entirely new
organization of the market, one that isolated fiction. This was the market the 18th
century was to establish.

Cervantes and the rise of the novel in the 17th century[edit]

Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas Exemplares (1613)

William Congreve, Incognita (1692)

The term novel was first used by William Painter for his Palace of Pleasure well
furnished with pleasaunt Histories and excellent Novelles (1566). Compared with
"romances"; "novelles", "novellas" or "novels" ("novel" became the standard term in
the 1650s) had to be short. The novel also had to give up all aspirations on
grandeur, heroism and the style romantic heroes and their actions required.
Romances focused on lonely heroes and their adventures, and novels on incidents
that could serve as examples for moral maxims. The titles of romances incorporated
the names of their respective heroes and heroines: "Artamene", "Clelie" were the
heroes of "heroic romances". "Satirical romances" did the same with their lower
class protagonists. The additional "Adventures of" would later emphasize the focus
on acts of heroism. In contrast the titles of novels preferred a two-part formula and
William Congreve's Incognita or Love and Duty Reconcil'd (1692) was typical of this.
The protagonists of novels were actors in a plot, and it was the plot that gave the
example and taught the vital lessons. These protagonists could be average human
beings without any special signs of grandeur, and not comical, but of the same
nature as their readers.[42] Unlike romances, the protagonists were not role models
though through their actions still taught lessons.

The rise of the novel as the major alternative to the romance began with the
publication of Cervantes Novelas Exemplares (1613). It continued with Scarron's
Roman Comique (the first part of which appeared in 1651), whose heroes noted a
rivalry of French romances and the new Spanish genre.[43]

Late 17th-century critics looked back on the history of prose fiction, proud of the
generic shift that had taken place, leading towards the modern novel/novella.[44] A

wave of "petites histoires" or "nouvelles historiques"[45] had replaced the old

romances. The first perfect works in French were those of Scarron and Madame de
La Fayette's "Spanish history" Zayde (1670). The development finally led to her
Princesse de Clves (1678), the first novel with what would become characteristic
French subject matter.

Europe witnessed the generic shift in the titles of works in French published in
Holland, which supplied the international market. English publishers exploited the
novel/romance controversy in the 1670s and 1680s.[46] The word novel began to
replace the word romance on title pages in the 1680s. Contemporary critics listed
the advantages of the new genre: brevity, a lack of ambition to produce epic poetry
in prose; the style was fresh and plain; the focus was on modern life, and on heroes
who were neither good nor bad. A reader learned through their actions, not by
imitating them.[47] The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip
and scandal fuelled the rise of the novel/novella. The authors of modern journalistic
gossip spiced their works with short anonymous histories. The stories were offered
as allegedly true recent histories, not for the sake of scandal but strictly for the
moral lessons they gave. To prove this, fictionalized names were used with the true
names in a separate key. The Mercure Gallant set the fashion in the 1670s.[48]
Collections of letters and memoirs appeared, and were filled with the intriguing new
subject matter and the epistolary novel grew from this and led to the first full blown
example of scandalous fiction in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman
and His Sister (1684/ 1685/ 1687). Before the rise of the literary novel, reading
novels had only been a form of entertainment.[49]

However, one of the earliest English novels, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719),
has elements of the romance, unlike these novels, thanks to its exotic setting and to
its hero's story of survival in isolation. Crusoe lacks almost all of the elements found
in these new novels: wit, a fast narration evolving around a group of young
fashionable urban heroes, along with their intrigues, a scandalous moral, gallant
talk to be imitated, and a brief, conciseness plot. The new developments did,
however, lead to Eliza Haywood's epic length novel, Love in Excess (1719/20) and to
Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741), with the typical twopart
title of a novel, which names the heroine and promises its value as an example.
Some literary historians date the beginning of the English novel with Richardson's
Pamela, rather than Crusoe [50]

The rise of the novel in England: 1700-1770[edit]

Total numbers of English titles, 16001799 according to ESTC data. Years of political
turmoil produced higher numbers of controversial short tracts.[note 14]

London's book market 1700, distribution of titles according to Term Catalogue data.
The poetical and fictional production does not have a unified place yet.

The yearly output of fiction in English.[note 15]

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).[note 16] Ian Watt puts
forward the idea that novel was a "new form" and associates this with the
importance placed on realism by novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel
Richardson, and Henry Fielding.[51] This theory about the novel in the 18th century
led to the suggestion that the earlier Romance forms of long prose narrative were
either not novels or were at least inferior.[52] However, others including Margaret
Anne Doody disagree that the novel originated in the 18th century, arguing that the
history of the novel is over two thousands years old, and that in addition the
romance tradition continued through the 18th and 19th centuries and still flourishes
today.[53] The idea of the rise of the novel in the 18th century is especially
associated with English literary criticism,[53] and most other European languages
use the same word for an extended narratives: "roman" in French, Dutch, Russian,
Croatian, Romanian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian; German "Roman"; Portuguese
"romance" and Italian "romanzo".[7] Novelist and critic Albert J. Guerard argues, in
The Triumph of the Novel (1976), on behalf of the anti-realist "other great tradition"
of the novel that includes Rabelais, Cervantes, Pynchon, Borges, Garca Mrquez,
the "Joyce of Finnegans Wake and the Nabakov of Ada", and sees Ian Watt's The
Rise of the Novel as contributing to a confusion between fiction and "real life", "by
its insistence on 'formal realism' as implicit in the novel form in general".[54]
Guerard suggests that Watt's book is most useful "for a study of the eighteenthcentury novel", but that it "should not be applied to the genre as a whole".[55]

Given these differences in opinion, what happened in the 18th century can best be
described, not as the rise of the novel, but the rise of realism in fiction. Indeed this
is what Ian Watt sees as distinguishing the novel from earlier prose narratives.[56]

There are several theories for the growth in the importance of realism in the history
of the novel. One is the growth in the number of novels published. English readers
of the late 17th and early 18th century were offered a total of some 2,000 to 3,000
titles per year. The numbers had risen dramatically after the abolition of the Star
Chamber in 1641. The simple title count gives, however, a distorted picture as it
equates the sales and influence of theological and political pamphlets with editions
of books printed to sell over several years. Statistics of the French and German
markets have their own distortions: French numbers are comparatively higher
because Dutch publishers printed (or reprinted) French books for the international
market. French was Europe's lingua franca and the language of international politics
and fashions. Germany's book trade was large but divided between Protestant and
Catholic states. The former had arranged for a wider exchange at Leipzig's fairs. The
academic production in Latin was comparatively large on the continent due to the
importance continental universities had gained as providers of careers.

Literature, as defined now, was of marginal significance in Europe until the end of
the 18th century. In the Western markets some 2% to 5% of the total production fell
into the categories of poetry and dubious or elegant historical works that were later
united under the new heading of "literature". In English, fictional output remained
here at 20 to 60 titles per year in the beginning of the 18th century, depending on
how one accounts for the wider market of histories. French, German and Dutch
statistics are comparable.[57] The eastern and southern European neighbors largely
subscribed to the international market.

The Western European output of literature in the modern sense rose significantly in
the course of the 18th century; the growth rates stabilised in the 1740s. A change in
the public appreciation supported that growth and was reflected by the growing
media coverage of new works.

The popularity of novels was a public issue in England during the 18th century. In
the media outlets of the times, much was written about the novels, the people who
wrote them, and the readers, and often painted them in a negative light. It was
believed that novels would have adverse effects on those who read them. Mainly
the concern was directed towards women because they were considered to be more
susceptible to the messages being conveyed in the novels. The romantic ideals in
novels were thought to be particularly detrimental to women causing them to either
think or act differently. Although there was a public outcry, society was not greatly
changed because of novels and their popularity did not decrease.[58]

Changing cultural status[edit]

By around 1700, fiction was no longer a predominantly aristocratic entertainment.
The Provenal 12th-century romances and their imitators had already attracted
urban connoisseurs who had had the financial means to commission bigger
manuscripts in the 14th and 15th centuries. 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. Spain was a trendsetter into the 1630s but
French authors superseded Cervantes, de Quevedo, and Alemn in the 1640s. As
Huet was to note in 1670, the change was one of manners.[note 17] The new French
works taught a new, on the surface freer, gallant exchange between the sexes as
the essence of life at the French court. Aristocratic and bourgeois customers sought
distinctly French authors to offer the authentic style of conversations in the 1660s.

The situation changed again from 1660s into the 1690s: the French market split.
Dutch publishers[59] began to sell works by French authors, published out of the
reach of French censors. The publishing houses of The Hague and Amsterdam also
pirated the entire Parisian production of fashionable books and thus created a new
market of political and scandalous fiction and European fashions. tienne Roger in
Amsterdam published Renneville's L'inquisition Franoise (1715), which was also
available in the year of its publication, in English and German. Books of the period
boasted of their fame on the international market and of the existence of
intermediate translations: "Written originally in Italian and translated from the third
edition of the French" is found on title page of Manley's New Atalantis in 1709. A
market of European rather than French fashions had arrived in the early 18th
century.[60]

Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711).

By the 1680s the fashionable political European production had inspired a second
wave of private scandalous publications and generated new productions of local
importance. Women authors reported on politics and on their private love affairs in
The Hague and in London. German students imitated them and used the relative
anonymity they enjoyed in far smaller towns like Jena, Halle and Leipzig, to boast of
their private amours in fiction.[61] The market of the metropolitan London, the
anonymous international market of the Netherlands, the urban markets of Hamburg
and Leipzig generated new public spheres.[note 18] Once private individuals, such
as students in university towns and daughters of London's upper class began to use
the novel as platform to exhibit their questionable reputations, the public began to
call for a reformation of manners. [note 19]

The reform became the main goal of the second generation of 18th-century
novelists who, by the mid-century, openly welcomed the change of climate that had
first been promoted in journals such as The Spectator. The Spectator Number 10
had stated that the aim was now "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit
with morality [] to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and
colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses").
Constructive criticism of novels had until then been rare.[note 20] The first treatise
on the history of the novel had appeared as a preface to a novel, Marie de La
Fayette's Zayde (1670). Journals devoted to the sciences could not easily switch to
devote themselves to belles lettres,[62] and a distinct secondary discourse
developed with a wave of entertaining new journals like The Spectator and The
Tatler at the beginning of the century. New "literary journals" like Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing's Briefe, die neuste Literatur betreffend (1758) added to this production in
the middle of the century with the offer of new, scientific reviews of art and fiction.
By the 1780s, reviews constituted a new marketing platform for fiction, and authors
and publishers recognized it as such. One could write to satisfy the old market or
one could address the authors of secondary criticism and gain an audience through
their discussions. It would take yet another generation for the novel to arrive in the
curricula of school and university education. By the end of the 18th century, the
public perception of the place of a particular novel was no longer supplied simply by
social status and fashionable geographical provenance, but by critical media
attention.

Realism and art[edit]

"Better than any romance" Constantin de Renneville's French Inquisition (1715),

the author's arrest.
The term "literary realism" is regularly applied to 19th-century fiction, and the
novels of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, whose works were published between
1719 and the 1750s, are regarded as precursors. Research of the last decades has,
however, contested views that it was Robinson Crusoe's realism that ended the
sway of "French baroque romances".[note 21] Madeleine de Scudry's "romances"
had not been completely unrealistic.[note 22] They had left the market nonetheless
in the 1670s, defeated by the more realistic "novels" that appeared then. Delarivier
Manley's Atalantis was reviewed by a German academic journal in 1713 as work of
contemporary public history.[note 23] Christian Friedrich Hunold fled Hamburg in
1706 after his Satyrischer Roman had depicted the city's elegant urban life as a
place of scandal.[63] The French pseudo histories connected today with names such

as Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (16441712) had become even more radical in

their realism and depicted the real world with a detail that rivalled that of historians.

Critics have noted that Defoe's Robinson Crusoe followed Alexander Selkirk's "true"
account.[note 24] and that Crusoe's style of writing used modes of the Protestant
spiritual autobiography.[64] However, Defoe's book had other models in the
contemporary French pseudo histories.[65] Ren Auguste Constantin de Renneville's
report of his imprisonment in the Bastille had appeared in English, published by
Defoe's publisher William Taylor four years before Crusoe. Renneville had promised:
"Lives and strange Adventures of several Prisoners", Crusoe risked the focus on
himself: "The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe". Robinson
Crusoe was serialized, in 171920, by The Original London Post as a possibly true
history.[note 25]

The 18th century witnessed the rise of increasingly realistic fiction, and with a
distinction made between fiction and history. This development reduced the
importance of works of disreputable fiction. Fiction became valued as a defender of
a higher truth, a truth beyond the flat, factual and historical truth of everyday
experience. In the second half of the 18th century theories of aesthetics praised the
"imitation of nature" and the artist's almost divine power to create worlds of a
deeper significance. The previous conflict between historians and romancers was
thus finally resolved: fictions and true histories became two distinct fields that the
modern nations needed. Literary journals and literary histories became the
privileged media for a new analysis of literary art, the development of which
eventually led to a change in how the word literature was applied in the 19th
century.

Novel and romance[edit]

The short "novel" supplanted the longer "romance" in the 1680s. It found a second
peak on title pages in the 1720s when it received its body of classics. The labeling
of fictions became only more interesting at the end of the century.[note 26]
The rise of the word novel at the cost of its rival, the romance, remained a Spanish
and English phenomenon, and though readers all over Western Europe had
welcomed the novel(la) or short history as an alternative in the second half of the
17th century, only the English and the Spanish had, however, openly discredited the
romance.

But the change of taste was brief and Fnelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) already
exploited a nostalgia for the old romances with their heroism and professed virtue.
Jane Barker explicitly advertised her Exilius as "A new Romance", "written after the
Manner of Telemachus", in 1715.[66] Robinson Crusoe spoke of his own story as a
"romance", though in the preface to the third volume, published in 1720, Defoe
attacks all who said "that [...] the Story is feign'd, that the Names are borrow'd, and
that it is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place".

The term novel first peaked on the English market in the 1680s, when the novel(la)
manifested itself as the alternative to the older "romance". However, the novel lost
its attractiveness with ensuing disreputable works. The 1720s saw a second peak of
novels with the first editions of classics of the genre and with new large-scale novels
in the style of Eliza Haywood. By the mid-18th century it was no longer clear
whether the market had not simply developed two linked terms: "romance" as the
generic term, and "novel" as a term for a fashionable product that focused on
modern life.

The late 18th century brought an answer with the Romantic Movement's readiness
to reclaim the word romance, especially with the gothic romance, but the historical
novels of Walter Scott also have a strong romance element. Robinson Crusoe
became a "novel" in this period appearing now as a work of the new realistic fiction
that the 18th century had created. [note 27] Throughout the 19th century,
romances continued to be written in Britain by writers like Emily Bront,[5] and in
America by the dark romantic novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
[67]

The acceptance of the novel as literature[edit]

Classics of the novel from the 16th century onwards: title page of A Select
Collection of Novels (172022).
The French churchman and scholar Pierre Daniel Huet's Traitt de l'origine des
romans (1670) laid the ground for a greater acceptance of the novel as literature in
the early 18th century. The theologian had not only dared to praise fictions, but he
had also explained techniques of theological reading, for the interpretation of
fiction, which was a novelty: an individual could read novels and romances to gain

insight into foreign and distant cultures as well as into his or her own culture.[note
28] He noted that Christ had used parables to teach.[68]

The decades around 1700 saw the appearance of new editions of Petronius, Lucian,
and Heliodorus of Emesa.[note 29] The publishers equipped them with prefaces that
referred to Huet's treatise.[note 30] and the canon it had established. Exotic fictions
entered the market that gave insight into the Islamic mind. Furthermore The Book of
One Thousand and One Nights was first published in Europe from 1704 to 1715 in
French, and then translated immediately into English and German, and was seen as
a contribution to Huet's history of romances.[note 31]

New classics were added to the market and the English, Select Collection of Novels
in six volumes (172022), is a milestone in this development. It included Huet's
Treatise, along with the European tradition of the modern novel of the day: that is,
novella from Machiavelli's to Marie de La Fayette's masterpieces. Aphra Behn's
prose fictions had appeared as "novels" in the 1680s but when reprinted in
collections, her works became classics. Fnelon's Telemachus (1699/1700) became
a classic within three years after its publication. New authors now entered the
market ready to use their own personal names as authors of fiction. Eliza Haywood
followed the footsteps of Aphra Behn when, in 1719, she used her name with
unprecedented pride.

The reformation of manners[edit]

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741)

The production of classics allowed the novel to gain a past, prestige and a canon. It
called at the same moment for a present production of equal merits. A wave of mid18th-century works that proclaimed their intent to propagate improved moral values
gave critics modern novels they could discuss publicly. Instead of banning novels,
the efforts at reformation of manners that had begun in the 1690s now led to their
reform.

Female authors and heroines were the first affected by the development. Madame
d'Aulnoy and Delarivier Manley became notorious examples of a bygone age of
impudence. They had washed their dirty linen in public and used their novels to
reinvent themselves and convert their own notoriety into fame. The new female

heroines had to show intimacy and sensitivity where their early-18th-century

ancestors had been ready to appear in public in order to sanitize their reputations.
Intimate confessions and blushes filled the new novels, feelings of guilt, even where
suspicions were groundless (early-18th-century heroines had defended their virtues
and reputations flamboyantly even where they had gone astray). The modern
heroines acted transparently, whereas their early-18th-century counterparts had
resorted to secret dealings in endless intrigues.[69] Madame de La Fayette's La
Princesse de Clves (1678) can be read as the first novel that showed the new
behavior.

Goethe's Werther (1774).

To become a fashion, if not the standard of modern behavior, the new personality
features needed new social environments. Marie de La Fayette's Princesse had
fallen into a desperate situation as soon as she risked the outrageous transparency
to confess her feelings for another man to her husband. Neither he nor his rival
knew how to continue once all this was clear. Mid-18th-century novels created
alternatives: protagonists acted transparently, their antagonists saw that as a
weakness and exploited and ruined them quite the early-18th-century option but
now the moral balance shifted: the open-hearted heroines were no longer victims
one could blame for a lack of virtue, but tragic (or melodramatic) figures who had
defended a better world. Other novels placed the new transparent heroines into
equally new caring environments. Their families resisted temptations to marry them
off against their wills, and men around them resisted temptations to seduce them in
moments of weakness. The message was that respect and care were to meet openheartedness in a new age of sensibility. Other novels experimented with surprising
acts of an enlightened rationality with which their protagonists could escape
deadlock situations far worse than the one Marie de La Fayette's Princesse had
produced with her confessions.

The last volume of Antoine Franois Prvost's Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of
Quality, "Manon Lescaut" (1731), aroused a scandal with its melodramatic turns and
its unresolved conflicts.

Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), composed "to cultivate the
Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes" focused, by
contrast, on the potential victim, a heroine of all the modern virtues vulnerable

through her social status and her occupation as servant of the libertine who falls in
love with her. Eventually, she shows the power to reform her antagonist.

Christian Frchtegott Gellert's Life of the Swedish Countess of G** (1747/48) tested
the options of rationality. The titular countess had to decide between two husbands
after her first, believed to be dead, returned from a Siberian war captivity. Both her
husbands, former friends, had to come to terms with the rational problem her
situation presented (and did it in a startling mixture of piety and modern
philosophy).

Beginnings of a secret market of pornography, illustration to vol. 1, p.50 of the 1766

Fanny Hill edition.
Male heroes adopted the new sentimental character traits in the 1760s. Laurence
Sterne's Yorick, the hero of the Sentimental Journey (1768) did so with an enormous
amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Henry
Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) produced the far more serious role models.

The virtuous production inspired a sub- and counterculture of pornographic novels.

Greek and Latin authors in modern translations had provided elegant transgressions
on the market of the belles lettres for the last century.[70] Satirical novels like
Richard Head's English Rogue (1665) had led their heroes through urban brothels,
women authors like Aphra Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as
precursors of the 19th-century femmes fatales without creating a subculture.[note
32] The market for belles lettres had been openly transgressive as long as it did not
find any reflections in other media. The new production beginning with works like
John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1748) differed in that it offered almost exact reversals of
the plot lines the virtuous production demanded. Fanny Hill is introduced to a life of
prostitution, learns to enjoy her part and establishes herself as a free and
economically independent individual, in editions one could only expect to buy under
the counter.[71]

Openly uncontrollable conflicts arrived in the 1770s with Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The titular hero realised how
impossible it had become for him to integrate into the new conformist society. Pierre
Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) shows the other extreme,
with a group of aristocrats playing games of intrigue and amorality.

The sentimental protagonists of the 1740s had already surprised their readers and
aroused a debate whether human nature was correctly depicted with these new
novels. They discovered a truth of the heart one had not dared to deal with so far.
The radical and lonely characters that appeared in the 1760s and 1770s broke with
traditions and eventually needed entirely new back-stories to become plausible.
Childhoods and adolescences had to explain why these protagonists should have
developed so differently. The concept of character development began to fascinate
novelists in the 1760s. Jean Jacques Rousseau's novels focused on such
developments in philosophical experiments. The German Bildungsroman offered
quasi-biographical explorations and autobiographical self-examinations of the
individual and its personal development by the 1790s. A subcategory of the genre
focused on the creation of an artist (if not the artist writing the novel). It led to the
19th-century production of novels exploring how modern times form the modern
individual.

Philosophical novels[edit]

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, p.70-71 (1769)

The new 18th-century status of the novel as an object of debate is particularly
manifest in special development of philosophical[note 33] and experimental novels.

Philosophical fiction was not exactly new. Plato's dialogues were embedded in
fictional narratives. Utopias had added to this production with works from Thomas
More's Utopia (1516) to Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602). Works such
as these had not been read as novels or romances but as philosophical texts. The
1740s saw new editions of More's work under the title that created the tradition:
Utopia: or the happy republic; a philosophical romance (1743).

Voltaire utilised the romance to write philosophy with his Micromegas: a comic
romance. Being a severe satire upon the philosophy, ignorance, and self-conceit of
mankind (1752, English 1753). His Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759) became central
texts of the French Enlightenment and of the modern novel. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
bridged the genres with his less fictional Emile: or, On Education (1762) and his far
more romantic Julie, or the New Heloise (1761). It made sense to publish these
works as romances or novels, works of fiction, only because prose fiction had
become an object of public discussion. The public reception provided by the new

market of journals was both freer and wider than the discussion in journals of
philosophy would have been. It had become attractive to step into the realm of
fiction in order to provide matter for the ongoing debates.

The genre's new understanding of itself resulted in the first metafictional

experiment, pressing against its limitations. Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (17591767) rejected continuous narration. It
expanded the author-reader communication from the preface into the plot itself:
Tristram Shandy develops as a conversation between the narrative voice and his
audience. Besides narrative experiments, there were visual experiments: a marbled
page, a black page to express particular sorrow, a page of little lines to visualize the
plot lines of the book one was reading. Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1704) is an
early precursor in this fielda work that employs visual elements with similar
ambitionyet hardly a text in the tradition of the original novel or its rival the
romance.

Romanticism: 17701837[edit]

Illustration of a Dutch edition of Juliette, a novel by the Marquis de Sade, c. 1800

The very word romanticism is connected to the idea of romance, and the romance
genre experienced a revival, at the end of the 18th century, with gothic fiction. The
origin of the gothic romance is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his
1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled (in its second edition) "A Gothic Story".
Other important works are Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and
'Monk' Lewis's The Monk (1795).

The new romances challenged the idea that the novel involved a realistic depictions
of life, and destabilized the difference the critics had been trying to establish,
between serious classical art and popular fiction. Gothic romances exploited the
grotesque,[72] and some critics thought that their subject matter deserved less
credit than the worst medieval tales of Arthurian knighthood, and that if the Amadis
had troubled Don Quixote with curious fantasies, the new romantic tales were
worse: they described a nightmare world, and explored sexual fantasies.[73]

The authors of this new type of fiction could be (and were) accused of exploiting all
available topics to thrill, arouse, or horrify their audience. These new romantic

novelists, at the same time, claimed to explore the entire realm of fictionality. New,
psychological interpreters, in the early 19th century, read these works as
encounters with the deeper hidden truth of the human imagination: this included
sexuality, anxieties, and insatiable desires. Under such psychological readings,
novels were described as exploring deeper human motives, and it was suggested
that such artistic freedom would reveal what had not previously been openly visible.

The romances of de Sade, Les 120 Journes de Sodome (1785), Poe's Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), and E. T. A.
Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815), would later attract 20th-century
psychoanalysts and supply the images for 20th- and 21st-century horror films, love
romances, fantasy novels, role-playing computer games, and the surrealists.

The ancient romancers most commonly wrote fiction about the remote past with
little attention to historical reality. Walter Scott's historical novel Waverley (1814)
broke with this earlier tradition of historical romance, and he was "the inventor of
the true historical novel".[74] At the same time he was a romantic and was
influenced by gothic romance. He had collaborated "with the most famous of the
Gothic novelists 'Monk' Lewis" on Tales of Wonder in 1801.[75] With his Waverley
novels Scott "hoped to do for the Scottish border" what Goethe and other German
poets "had done for the Middle Ages, "and make its past live again in modern
romance".[76] Scott's novels "are in the mode he himself defined as romance, 'the
interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents'".[77] He used his
imagination to re-evaluate history by rendering things, incidents and protagonists in
the way only the novelist could do. His work remained historical fiction, yet it
questioned existing historical perceptions. The use of historical research was an
important tool: Scott, the novelist, resorted to documentary sources as any historian
would have done, but as a romantic artist he gave his subject a deeper imaginative
and emotional significance.[77] By combining research with "marvelous and
uncommon incidents", Scott attracted a far wider market than any historian could,
and he became the most famous novelist of his generation, throughout Europe.[78]

The Victorian period: 1837-1901[edit]

During the 19th century, romances continued to be written in Britain, and major
writers such as Charles Dickens[79] and Thomas Hardy [80] were influenced by the
tradition. The Bront sisters are notable mid-19th-century creators of romance.
Their works include Anne Bront's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte Bront's
Jane Eyre and Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights.[81] Publishing first at the very end
of the 19th century, Joseph Conrad has been called, "a supreme 'romancer'".[82] In

America, it was said, "the romance has proved to be a serious, flexible, and
successful medium for the exploration of philosophical ideas and attitudes" into the
20th century, and notable examples are Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter,
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, William
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Robert Penn Warren's World Enough and Time.
[67]

European figures that were influenced by romanticism include Victor Hugo, with
novels like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misrables (1862), and
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, whose novel A Hero of Our Time (1840) is notable for
introducing Superfluous man into the world of literature.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1868/69)

Illustration for Jules Verne's Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870)
Most 19th-century authors hardly went beyond illustrating and supporting
widespread historical views.[83] The more interesting titles won fame by doing what
no historian or journalist could do: make the reader experience another life. mile
Zola's novels depicted the world of the working classes, which Marx and Engels
wrote about in a non-fictional mode. Slavery in the United States, abolitionism and
racism became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which dramatises topics that had previously been
discussed mainly in the abstract. Charles Dickens novels led his readers into
contemporary workhouses, and provided first hand accounts of child labour. The
treatment of the subject of war changed with Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
(1868/69), where he questions the facts provided by historians. Similarly the
treatment of crime is very different in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
(1866), where the point of view is that of a criminal. Women authors had dominated
the production of fiction from the 1640s into the early 18th century, but few before
George Eliot so openly questioned the role, education, and status of women in
society.

As the novel became the most interesting platform of modern debate, national
literatures were developed, that link the present with the past in the form of the
historical novel. Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (1827) did this for Italy,
while novelists in Russia and the surrounding Slavonic countries, as well as the
Scandinavian countries, did likewise.

With the new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. This
had been done earlier in works like Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth
Century (1733) and Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), a work whose plot
culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague.
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine
(1895) were marked by the idea of long term technological and biological
developments. Industrialization, Darwin's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of
class divisions shaped these works and turned historical processes into a subject
matter of wide debate: Bellamy's Looking Backward became the second best-selling
book of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher-Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.[84][note
34] Such works inspired a whole genre of popular science fiction as the 20th century
approached.

Literary realism[edit]
Main article: Literary realism
Literary realism is the trend, beginning with mid nineteenth-century French
literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors,
toward depictions of contemporary life and society as it was, or is. In the spirit of
general "realism," realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal
activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized
presentation. George Eliot's novel Middlemarch stands as a great milestone in the
realist tradition.[citation needed] It is a primary example of nineteenth-century
realism's role in the naturalization of the burgeoning capitalist marketplace.[citation
needed] William Dean Howells was the first American author to bring a realist
aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His most popular novel, The Rise of
Silas Lapham, depicts a man who, ironically, falls from materialistic fortune by his
own mistakes.[citation needed]

The creation of national literatures[edit]

In the 19th-century an increasing emphasis on the idea of national literature helped
shape the future of the novel. The nationalistic analysis of literature had begun in
Germany in the late 1720s with a look back on three decades of international

European fashions. German authors had embraced French "gallantry" as the

essence of elegance and style. However, Germany had gained nothing in the wars
the European nations had supported on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire, and the
decades of the Nine Years War (16891697), the War of the Spanish Succession
(17011714), and the Great Northern War (17001721) had eventually left the
German speaking intellectual elite disenchanted. This help create interest interest in
the 1720s in Johann Christoph Gottsched proposed national project to reform the
entire market of German poetry. Subsequently Johann Jakob Bodmer, Johann Jakob
Breitinger, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing adopted Gottsched's project and created
the national discourse that finally gained national importance between 1789 and
1813, when Germany had to define itself politically and culturally as a result of the
French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars.

Another important influence in Germany was Georg Gottfried Gervinus' multivolume Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (1835-1842),
which became the European model for literary history, and in which the new literary
historian spoke about the cultural significance of the works he analysed. Unlike
Pierre Daniel Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances (1670), which had been a
world history of fiction, Gervinus was solely interested in the works of the German
nation, whose history and mentality he hoped to better understand, and other
nations were of interest only in so far as they had been an intellectual threat.

At the start of the 19th century, the first German states implemented the new
nationalistic field of literary studies in their national school curricula. Then three
decades later the first histories of German literature appeared with proposals for the
canon it was felt that the young nation would need.[85] Thereafter literature began
to penetrate into German educational system, including universities, and criticism in
the public media.

Charles Dickens offering a public reading of his works, a symbol of the new literary
life. Harper's Weekly, December 7, 1867.
The new topic was of immense interest because it focussed on the idea of a national
literature,[note 35] and threw a controversial perspectives on the nation's history
and identity, and attempts to reform the publishing of fiction. The secularization of
society propelled the discussion of national literature forward in both France and
Germany. Literature now offered texts of international significance, that could be
used in schools and universities instead of religious texts.[86]

What had happened in Germany subsequently persuaded scholars in France and

Italy to write similar histories to that of Georg Gottfried Gervinus for their own
countries. However, the English speaking world remained rather uninterested and it
was Frenchman Hippolyte Taine who eventually wrote the first history of English
literature in 1863, at first in French, and an English version a year later that opened
with a look back at the recent history of modern literary history:

HISTORY, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has
undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures.The discovery has been
made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice
of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the
sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that,
through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought
many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful. We have
meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have accepted them as facts
of prime significance. We have found that they were dependent on most important
events, that they explain these, and that these explain them, and that henceforth it
was necessary to give them their place in history, and one of the highest.[87]

mile Zola, the political novelist in the centre of the public outrage he unleashed
(painting by Henry de Groux, 1898).
The English speaking world adopted the new, nationalistic analysis of literature
reluctantly. London had developed a commercial production of the belles lettres,
independent from the markets of Amsterdam and Paris, as early as the early 18th
century. The new market had found its own commercial criticism and did not need
an academic variant with a distinctly national perspective. Shakespeare had
become an object of national veneration without the help of academic critics by the
1760s. A rediscovery of the past had followed, with such doubtful discoveries as the
Ossian fragments. Critics discussed the belles lettres in fashionable English journals
and the latest theatre performances were reviewed in newspapers at the end of the
18th century. The continental debate of about literature therefore remained initially
of little interest in Britain.

Furthermore Great Britain did not need new national platforms. State politics and
religion were open platforms, in Britain protected by modern press laws since the
1690s. However, Continental Europe had opted for a fundamental secularization of

society. On the other hand the British constitution rested on a union of Church and
State, and the USA on a separation of Church and State. Neither country needed to
employ literary text the way that religious texts had been used previously. In Great
Britain the criticism of plays and fictions was served by the commercial criticism the
market created. Germany, on the other hand invented a dualism of
"Literaturwissenschaft", literary criticism formulated by university professors, and
"Literaturkritik", literary criticism to be found in the newspapers. However, a single
phrase is sufficient in English.

Oscar Wilde on trial in 1895.

The new topic of a national literature was eventually adopted both in Britain and the
US in the 1870 and 1880s, and the educational systems of the various Western
nations developed international standards. The Western canon became the project
of a new international competition.[note 36] The Western nations defined
themselves as "Kulturnationen", exporters of a specific Western civilization to their
expanding Colonial Empires, which eventually shared the same educational
institutions as the colonizing powers.[88]

New commercial rules began to shape the relationship between author, publisher
and reader. Most of the early-18th-century authors of fiction had published
anonymously. They had offered their manuscripts and received all the payment to
be expected for the manuscript. The new copyright laws introduced in the 18th and
19th centuries[89][note 37] promised a profit share on all future editions. This
created a new market for experimental novels that readers might find difficult to
understand. Such works were published in a small first edition, in the hope that the
critics would recognize their artistic merit. Novelists, mere purveyors of
entertainment at one time, now assumed a new role as public voices, speaking as
their nation's conscience, as national sages, and farsighted judges in newspapers, in
public debates. The novelist who reads in theatres, halls, and book shops is a 19thcentury invention.[90]

Fiction was altered by these changes and difficult texts were created that could not
be understood without the aid of critical interpretation. New novels openly
addressed the present political and social issues, which were also discussed by
other media. The idea of responsibility became a key issue, whether of the citizen
whose voice is heard, or of the artist whose work future generations will evaluate.
The theoretical debate concentrated on the moral soundness of modern novels,[91]

on the integrity of individual artists, as well as the provocative claims of

aestheticists such as Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who proposed to
write "art for art's sake".[92]

Works of literature were matched by a growing market of popular fiction. In the

19th-century new institutions like the circulating library create a new market for
publishers' first editions. Fiction also became the object of a new mass reading
public[93] protected, monitored and analysed by nationwide debates and by
institutions the state would hope to control. These developments did not, however,
lead to stable definitions of the terms it popularized, so that Art, literature and
culture became the arena of controversy.

The modern individual[edit]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795)

The individual, the potentially isolated hero, had stood at the centre of romantic
fictions since the Middle Ages. The early novel(la) had placed the story itself at the
centre: it was driven by plot, by incident and accident, rather than being the story
of a single larger-than-life figure. And yet, the individual had returned with a wave of
satirical romances and historical pseudo romances. Individuals such as Robinson
Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Clarissa reintroduced the old romantic focus on
the individual as the centre of what was to become the modern novel.

Ancient, medieval and early modern fictional characters lacked certain features that
modern readers expect. Epics and romances created heroes, individuals who would
fight against knight after knight, change (as an Assyrian princess) into men's
clothes, survive alone on an island while it would never see its personal
experience as an individualizing factor. The early modern novelist had remained a
historian as much as the author of the most personal French contemporary memoir.
As soon as it came to relating the facts and experiences, it became a question of
proper writing skills.

The modern individual changed. The rift can first be seen in the works of medieval
mystics and early modern Protestant autobiographers:[94] moments in which they
witnessed a change in their very experience of things, an inner isolation they would
only be able to communicate to someone who had experienced the same. The

sentimental experience created a new field of secular, rather than religiously

motivated individualizations which immediately invited followers to join. Werther's
step out of the value systems that surrounded him, his desperate search for the one
and only soul to understand him, inspired an instantaneous European fashion.
Napoleon told Goethe he had read the volume about a dozen times;[95] others were
seen wearing breeches in Werther's colour to signal that they were experiencing the
same exceptionalism. The novel proved the ideal medium for the new movements
as it was ultimately written from an individual's point of view with the aim to unfold
in the silence of another's individual mind.

The late-18th-century exploration of personal developments created room for

depictions of personal experiences; it gained momentum with the romantic
exploration of fictionality as a medium of creative imagination; and it gained a
political edge with the 19th-century focus on history and the modern societies. The
rift between the individual and his or her social environment had to have roots in
personal developments which this individual shared with those around him or her,
with his or her class or the entire nation. Any such rift had the power to criticize the
collective histories the modern nations were just then producing. The new personal
perceptions the protagonists of novels offered were on the other hand interesting as
they could easily become part of the collective experience the modern nation had to
create.

First galley proof of In Search of Lost Time (19131927) with handwritten revision
notes by Marcel Proust.
The novel's individual perspective allowed for personal reevaluations of the public
historical perceptions and it allowed for personal developments that could still lead
back into modern societies. The 19th-century Bildungsroman became the arena of
such explorations of personal developments that separated the individual from, and
then reunited it with, his or her social environment. Outsider perspectives became
the field of mid-19th-century explorations. The artist's life had been an interesting
topic before with the artist being by public definition the exceptional individual
whose perceptions naturally enabled him to produce different views. Novels from
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795) to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913
1927) and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) created an
entire genre of the Knstlerroman. Jane Austen's Emma (1815), Gustave Flaubert's
Madame Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (187377), and George Eliot's
Middlemarch (187172) brought female protagonists into the role of the outstanding
observer. Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1839) and Gottfried Keller's Green Henry
(1855) focused on the perspectives of children, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and

Punishment (1866) added a drop-out student who became a murderer to the

spectrum of special observers whose views would promise reinterpretations of
modern life.

The exploration of the individual's perception eventually revolutionized the very

modes of writing fiction. The search for one's personal style stood in the centre of
the competition among authors in the 19th century, now that novelists had become
publicly celebrated minds. The destabilization of the author-text connection, which
20th-century criticism was to propose later on, finally led to experiments with what
had been the individual's voice so far speaking through the author or portrayed by
him. These options were to be widened with new concepts of what texts actually
were with the beginning of the 20th century.

The 20th century and later[edit]

See also: Modernism and Postmodernism
Global market place[edit]

Berlin, May 10, 1933, Nazi book burning.

Persian Samizdat edition of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses late 1990s?

Announcement of the Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2008: Jean-Marie

Gustave Le Clzio
Given the number of new editions and the place of the modern novel among the
genres sold in bookshops today, the novel is far from the crisis predicted by John
Barth. Literature has not ended in "exhaustion"[96] or in a silent "death".[97] New
technologies continue to be rapidly adapted for the writing and distributing of
novels. In 1968, four years after the introduction of the first word processor, the IBM
MT/ST, the first novel was written on it Len Deighton's Bomber, published in 1970.
[98] Printed books have not yet been superseded by new media such as cinema,
television or such new channels of distribution as the Internet, [note 38] or e-books.
Novels such as the Harry Potter (19972007) books have created public sensation
among an audience critics had seen as lost.[note 39]

Novels were among the first material artefacts the Nazis burnt in public celebrations
of their power in 1933;[99] and they remained the very last thing they allowed their
publishers to print as World War II ended in the devastation of central Europe: fiction
could still be employed to keep the retreating troops in dream worlds of an idyllic
homeland waiting for