(toc) #title= (Table of Content)
The English Novel
T(caps)he Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2007) defines the novel as "a long written story about imaginary or partly imaginary characters and events." Collins English Dictionary (2006) defines the novel as "an extended fictional work in prose dealing with characters, action, thought, etc., in the form of a story. The Oxford Dictionary (2000) defines the novel as a fictive prose narrative of considerable length in which characters and acts representative of real life of past and present time are portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity. But the Sierra Leonian literary critic, Austace Palmer, says "the novel is a coherent, unified fictitious prose narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end" (Studies in the English Novel, 1986).
What differentiates the novel from any other work of prose fiction or narratives such as the short story or novelette is the extended form of the novel.
The novel as we know it today is the creative work of people's imagination and it may be said to be the youngest of the genres of literature, that is, drama, prose, and poetry, since it became popular in the eighteenth-century period of English literary history. Although it grew from the early prose writing often described as romance, which was invented by the Greeks and French in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D., tales of various types had existed in parts of Europe, Greece, Italy, Spain, and France before the emergence of the modern novel. Indeed, before the appearance of the novel, the epic, romances, novelette, pastorals, and travel literature dominated the English literary space. Prominent among such antecedent narrative forms are The Spanish Cervante's Don Quixote (1605), Sir Phillip Sidney's The Arcadia (1590), Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Thomas Nash's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), as well as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678). However, with the arrival of writers using loose narrative form, allegory and journalistic portraiture, the English novel finally arrived with a promising future. Examples of such novels are Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722); Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1740); and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrew (1742).
Literary critics, it appears, were not united early over who among the founding fathers of the English novel should be given the exalted or honoured crown of the first English novelist. Consequently, Richardson may have been accredited with the honour of being the first English novelist.
3.2 Factors that gave Rise to the English Novel
The following are the factors that gave rise to the Novel in the 18th century.
3.2.1 Introduction of Printing in England
Printing technology began in England in the 15th century. As a result, it became easier for diaries, short essays, pamphlets, letters, and books of various types to be printed and distributed to the English reading populace. With such great achievement, the prose narrative became very popular in England as people found it enterprising to document events and even write biographies, autobiographies, keep diaries and write journals.
3.2.2 Increased Interest in Reading
The technological development and reformation of the 1500 flagged the interests of the public to the pleasure of reading. For instance, people read more of Christian hymnal books, the Holy Bible, and religious pamphlets. Thus, reading which was the exclusive preserve of the middle class and educated few, was extended to the other members of the populace, including women.
3.2.3 Journalism became a notable profession
With increased interests of the public in storytelling, reading, and writing became an avenue through which the social concern of the English society could be expressed. Religious, economic as well as political and educational issues found an acceptable outlet of expression. The Guardian and English Man are some of the magazines of the period. Thus, Addison and Steel's periodical, Tattler and Spectator, are well known. Among the people, Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe are notable writers who had worked as journalists in the period before going into the business of novel writing.
3.2.4 Book Publishing as a Social Business in England
Book publishing became a social business in England as the combined interests of the English people in reading and writing flowered. The advent of printing and publishing houses emerged to cater to the needs of the evolving libraries and the reading populace. The book industry boomed based on the popularity of the novel genre.
3.2.5 Changes in the economy of the period
The reading revolution can be explained based on the changes in the reading taste of the middle class merchants who clamoured for a new kind of literature that is different from the old classical adventure of literature fabled stories of kings and knights. Essentially, their preferred choice must tell contemporary stories. It must adequately represent the social, economic, religious and political life of the middle class merchants to cater for their time of leisure. Such literature that will reflect the social intellectual revolutions of the time, as well as the dominating philosophy of the 'moneyed' classes of the new economy order, quite different from the old agricultural economy of feudal aristocracy was important.
3.3 Types of the Novel
The following are the types of the novel with relevant examples.
3.3.1 Historical Novel
This type of novel uses events and characters from past experience to develop and make its narrative interesting. Its settings are usually taken from real-life history.
Examples are Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819), Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), and Olaudah Equiano's Travels (1789).
3.3.2 Picaresque
This type of novel uses rogues, beggars, rascals as characters, usually with rascally heroic figure or personae. The name, Picaresque, is derived from the Spanish word, "Piccaro". This type of novel originated from Spain in the 16th Century. Examples are Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, (1749).
3.3.3 Bildungsroman
This type of novel takes its form from a German term which means, "a novel of education". It reveals every stage of growth of the protagonist or hero in the novel, usually from childhood through adolescence to maturity. Examples of such novels are George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Charles Dickens' Great Expectation (1861).
3.3.4 Epistolary
This type of narrative is told in the form of a letter or letters. The "Epistle" "Epistola" is the Latin word for letter. Examples are Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1948), Sir Charles Grandison (1754). These novels marked the beginning of the epistolary form of novel writing.
3.3.5 Social/Sociological Novel
This type of novel deals with the social economic conditions of a period, characters and events, the culture of the people and their general ways of life. Examples are George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859); Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1883), Hard Times (1854); John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939); Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles (1891); George & Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody (1994), and Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1993).
3.3.6 Magic/Magical/Marvelous Realism
This type of novel combines reality with fantasy, ordinary events and experiences, dreamlike state, myths, fairy tales, and supernatural elements. This type of novel originated from the prose fiction of some Latin American writers. Examples are Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991), Gabriel Garcia's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and Satanic Verses (1988).
3.3.7 Political Novel
This type of novel deals with the science and art of government. It concerns itself with the strategies, systems of politics and politicking or governance, manoeuvres, and display of justice and injustice, as well as Machiavellian style of government and power play. Examples are Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), and George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945).
3.3.8 Psychological
This type of novel probes the minds of the characters rather than the environment of such characters. It was made popular by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the 20th century. Examples are Marcel Beyer's The Karnau Tapes (1997), and Lemon Lee's Bells (1978).
3.3.9 Autobiographical
This is the type of novel on the life history of its writer from childhood through adulthood, relating the writers' social experience through maturity. Examples are Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1999).
3.3.10 Gothic
This became popular in the 18th century. It concerns itself with sentimentality and crimes of the times such as murder, rape, piracy, kidnapping, sodomy and other corrupt abominable acts. The Gothic novel, usually with the medieval setting of the Dark Age, is known for mysteries, secret undergrounds, unknown horrible chambers, terrible fetish, and ghost-invested dark passages. It usually has a plot that allows an innocent heroine to suffer torture, etc. Its actions are often crafted to frighten and terrorise. Examples are Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, and James Joyce's Dubliners (1993).
3.3.11 Novel of Ideas
This type of novel is based on the ideals of its contents. Its themes often focus on certain philosophies or ideologies. Examples of such novels are E. M. Foster's A Passage to India (1924), Albert Camus' The Fall, the Plague (1957), Marcel Beyer's The Karnau Tapes (1997), and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1787).
3.3.12 Science Fiction
This type of novel explores science and scientific investigations and determinism proof to unravel the mystery about planets, nature, etc., or to execute a desire backed up by experience. It relies on the possibility of scientific probing to justify action and inactions. Examples are Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) and Short Man's The Glasses (1942). The French Emily Zola (1840- 1902) was one of the chief exponents of the naturalistic (that is, biological) fiction.
3.3.13 Detective Novels
Such novels often deal with the use of characters to probe and unravel critical mysteries that surround people, a nation, or continent. An example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (1992).
3.4 Elements of the Novel
Novelists often use language to communicate intention or ideas to his readers through characters with a combination of some elements. Such elements include plot, setting, subject matter, theme, point of view, and vision.
3.4.1 Plot
This is the organized sequence of events in the novel. The plot of a novel is not its story, but the lined up, chronological, organized order of the entire events of the story that make up the novel. Plots are of various types; they could be simple or complex.
3.4.2 Simple Plot
The events in simple plot novels are usually in chronological order following the adventure of the hero or major character to its end. An example is Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722).
3.4.3 Complex Plot
In this type of plot, the author's order of arrangement does not often follow an easily traceable form, as the reader may have to adopt the use of careful logic to re-organize the story for easy follow-up. This is because the incident that ends the novel may begin in the middle or may even end it. The reader is given the task of rearranging or reorganizing the plot so as to piece together the different parts that may not be chronologically arranged. Examples are Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Jane Austen's Emma (1816).
Stages of Plot Development
Plots of a story often develop in the following stages. They are:
Expository - the writer introduces the characters and setting to begin the conflict;
The conflict moves/develops through the rising action;
The high point of the story is its climax;
The author explains the results of the climax through the falling action
The conflict is resolved in its resolution/dénouement.
3.4.4 Subject Matter
This is the immediate concern of the novelist in a novel. For example, William Golding's Lord of the Flies is concerned at the immediate level with how a group of school children scattered in the different parts of an island, tried to make a home and survive. But other deeper concerns are the humanities of man to man and the disorganized form of the modern person's form of government. There is just a slight difference between the subject matter and the themes in a novel. The subject is all what the story is about.
3.4.5 Theme
This is the sum total of the ideas in a novel. Theme is deeper than subject matter. For example, the theme of Earnest Hemingway's Old man and the Sea is life as a place of continuous struggle for survival. George Orwell's Animal Farm is about social economic and political oppression.
3.4.6 Characterisation
This is another important element of the novel. Characters are the fictive personae that carry and execute the events in a novel. They are often given the qualities of human beings and made to act like one in a given or created fictive environment such that their behaviours appear real like that of the real you and I. In a novel, characters can be flat or rounded.
3.4.6.1 Flat or two Dimensional Characters
They are often given a simple portrayal in novels and little is often known about them. There is a limit to their growth; often a little static. Flat characters cannot be measured, the same way all human beings cannot be heroic or equal in behaviour - social, economic status, etc. For example, many of the characters in Louis Robinson Stevenson's Treasure Island are flat or not fully developed.
3.4.6.2 Rounded or Three-dimensional Characters
Such characters are complex and fully developed. They grow along through the circumstances created by the writer of the novel. S/he may even see them from childhood till old age, even till death. An example is Crusoe in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
3.4.6 Time and Space in the Novel
The action in the novel passes through time periods. This is also a passage of time. It is through time and space that the events in the novel acquire its reality and correctness. Action in a novel is considered for human good when it transcends or passes through time and space. Time in fiction can be used in two categories: chronological and functional.
Functional
Chronological
Time can be measured or quantified; for instance, at 25, Glory graduated from the University and married at 35.
Adapted from Akachi Ezeigbo (1981)
3.4.7 Character's level of involvement in the Novel
Characters in the novel genre are not often of equal level of involvement in the conflicts they generate. Character's level of participation, performance, general involvement in the crises and the strength of endurance, climaxing of events in the novel, all go a long way to determine involvements. All characters, flat or rounded, are naturally involved in any novel, no matter how minimal or minute the character's role may be.
3.4.8 Setting
This is the physical environment, place or location in which the events in a novel take place. Traditional narratives have no physical setting but fictive setting like, "once upon a time, in the community of the fishes..." It is the ability of the novelist to describe the setting convincingly that makes the novel appear real. For example, William Golding's Lord of the Flies is set on an island, thus the island becomes a reflection of our bigger, but real world.
3.4.9 Language
It is through language that literature is expressed. The novelist put words in the mouth of the characters he has created and makes them speak and perform some actions. But the use of language differentiates one character from another, father from a son, a king from his subjects and so on. A character may be non-human like wind, trees, or animals. The novelist's ability to use language, manipulate tones, use figurative, idioms, irony, proverbs, humour, amongst others, contributes to the style of the writer.
3.4.10 Point of View
This is the way in which the novelist gets his story told through which he wins the reader's sympathy. It is the position through which events are observed in the novel. It is the way a writer presents his characters through action and dialogue. The method of storytelling is an important element in the novel. Some important points of view are discussed below.
3.4.10.1 Eye of God or Omniscient Point of View
This is a way of telling stories in which the author presents the story as everything. S/He knows the actions, events, characters, and other things in the story. The omniscient narrator moves into and out of events, as s/he knows everything, events, movements of the story, time and space. S/he knows the private life, innermost thoughts, feelings emotions of the characters. As a result of such attributes, the storyteller is often called the "Eye of God". This is different from the editorial omniscience or objective/intrusive narrator who simply reports and comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the characters. This technique has been used in Matthew's Truth's Halfway to Hell (1975) and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrew. (1742)
3.4.10.2 Multiple Points Of View
A number of characters tell the story, revealing their views and judgments on a story such that the reader is at a vantage position to understand the story. There may not be a central character but a number of narrators who move the story forward with each commenting on the story.
3.4.10.3 Mixed Point of View
This style of storytelling is not common; it happens when there is an alternative of the omniscience or other point of view.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE
Differentiate between the epistolary and the sociological novels.
4.0 CONCLUSION
In this unit, we have defined the novel genre, the factors that gave rise to the novel, types of the novel, its elements, time and space in the novel. We also relate the novel to concepts like setting, language, and point of view as well as the meaning of character's scale of involvement in the crisis in a novel.
5.0 SUMMARY
In this unit, you have learned:
. the definition of the novel;
. factors that gave rise to the novel;
. types of the novel;
. elements of the novel;
. the meaning of character's involvement in a novel
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