THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

The novel originated in the early 18th century after the Italian word "novella", which was used for stories in the medieval period. Its identity has evolved and now a work of prose fiction is at least 50,000 words. Novels focus on character development more than plot. In any genre, it is the study of the human psyche.

The ancestors of the novel were Elizabethan prose fiction and French heroic romances, which were long narratives about contemporary characters who behaved nobly.  The novel came into popular awareness due to a growing middle class with more leisure time to read and money to buy books. Public interest in the human character led to the popularity of autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries and memoirs.  The early English novels concerned themselves with complex, middle-class characters struggling with their morality and circumstances.

Various  writers contributed to the rise of the novel in the 18th century.

Daniel Defoe is  generally   regarded  as the first true novelist and the creator  of realistic  fiction.  He  wrote  in a matter-of-fact style and combined  this  with powerful  narrative  and a journalistic  curiosity.  His novels  mixed  adventure with physical and psychological  realism. Defoe's protagonists  of   Robinson Crusoe  (1719) and  Moll Flanders  (1722)  are self-reliant, resourceful individualists who express his middle-class values. In his attempt to balance individualism and economic realism with a belief in God's providence, Defoe created complex characters who combine repentance for past misdeeds with a celebration of the individual's power to survive in a hostile environment.

Samuel Richardson blended realism and romance into his works;  he  developed  the  epistolary  novel  into a  serious art. His  novels are defined  as “novels of character”  since he focused  not on action,  but on states  of  consciousness.  The epistolary form perfectly suited the expression of  Richardson’s heroines’ feelings.

Jonathan Swift  is one of the most controversial  among the great  English writers. All  his  works  are  characterized by his polemical  genius;  his  masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels  is  a  political satire  of his times  in which he uses the various races and societies Gulliver encounters  in his travels to satirize man’s errors, vanities, follies  and  frailties; despite the depth and subtlety of the book, it is often classified as a children's story because of  Gulliver’s amusing and  absurd  adventures.

Laurence Sterne can be considered one of the fathers of the experimental novel. His masterpiece,  Tristram Shandy  is often referred to as an anti-novel  because it ignores or subverts the realistic conventions that the novel was developing in the Augustan Age. His manipulation of time anticipates  by almost two centuries  the experiments of Modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

To sum up, 18th-century  novels  shared the following features:

• The writer’s primary aim was to write in a simple way in order to be understood even by less well educated readers.
• The realism of the novel was not linked to the kind of life presented, but to the way it was shown.
• The hero of the novel was always the “bourgeois man”  with his problems; he was generally the mouthpiece of his author and the reader was expected to sympathise with him.
• All the characters were given contemporary names and surnames to reinforce the impression of realism, and they struggled either for survival or social success.
• A chronological sequence  of events was generally adopted.
• References were made  to particular times of the year or of the day.
• Great attention was paid to the setting with  specific references to names of countries, streets and towns, together with detailed  descriptions of interiors.
• The narrator never abandoned his characters whether the author employed 1^st-person  or 3^rd-person narration.
• The story was particularly attractive for the practical-minded tradesman, who was self-made and self-reliant.
• The sense of reward and punishment, which was the “message” of the novel itself, was related to the Puritan ethics of the middle classes.

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