Introduction:
The Emergence of the Novel

Origins and Precursors

The modern novel appeared only after centuries of vigorous experiment. The novel developed slowly in the 17th and 18th centuries, gradually taking shape as writers drew on various literary traditions and responded to several crucial social and intellectual influences. Although many critics consider the modern novel to have emerged in England, the three chief fictional precursors of the novel were French (the romance), Italian (the novella), and Spanish (the picaresque narrative). Behind these relatively modern genres lay the great tradition of the epic, the vast, compendious form which presented a people's most deeply-rooted values to itself--a task which the novel eventually claimed for itself. Still another tradition upon which novelists drew (and still draw) is that of the history: the factual account of real events.

The Romance: The usual European term is roman, reflecting the origin of the form in the medieval romance. Originally, romanice simply meant "in the Roman language." In Old French, the word roman described profane fictions about Arthur, Charlemagne, the knights of their courts, and classical heroes. Originally in verse, these elegant, highly conventional tales of chivalric adventure, celebrated courtly love in the framework of a knight's quest for his lady's favour (modern "romance novels" are similarly conventional and indeed have similar themes). The romances emerged in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, soon spreading from France to other parts of Europe and to England, where the Arthurian Romances became enduring works in verse and prose.

The Novella: The English term novel is derived from the Italian novella, literally meaning "a little new thing"; the term was used to describe brief prose tales, often quite scandalous. Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 1351) is the most famous collection of such tales. The 100 tales are linked by a loose narrative frame: ten handsome young nobles flee the plague in Florence and spend ten days entertaining one another with story-telling. Each person tells one tale each day, and each day has a set theme. The tales were brief, and most of the interest derived from the plot. Few bothered with character development.

The Picaresque Narrative: The name of the "picaresque narrative" derives from the Spanish picaro, rogue. The form emerged in the 16^th century and became popular internationally in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The anonymous narrative Lazarillo de Tormes was the first recognizable picaresque novel, although the basic model was established in classical literature: Apuleius' The Golden Ass is generally considered a precursor of the later form. The most famous quasi-picaresque narrative is Cervantes' Don Quixote of 1605. Picaresque narratives are scurrilous, highly episodic, but linked by common characters. Modern counterparts include episodic tales of skullduggery and low-living such as Moll Flanders and Huckleberry Finn.

Histories: In the seventeenth century the word "novel" was frequently applied to romances of illicit love--one of the most original of which was written by a woman playwright and poet, Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, or the History of a Royal Slave (1688). Against the background of a real setting--that is to say, one involving the true names of persons and places--it told a tale of heroic love. It was pure Restoration drama, in fact, and it was indeed eventually adapted for the stage. The subtitle "History" is interesting. In its early form, the novel usually made no claims to being an art form. Benn states in the introductory lines of her story that she witnessed many of the chief scenes she described. This was no more than history in the older sense of the word. The boundary between fact and fiction tends to become more and more blurred as we travel backward in time. The traditional idea of writing history was that the events were true, but the descriptions, dialogue, and various minor details were invented. This is somewhat like the modern school of journalism which claims to change only the names, dates, settings, and details of conversations (to protect the innocent sources): everything else is true. Behn's claim was taken seriously--so seriously that it has been assumed, for more than two hundred years, that she lived for a time in the West Indian setting of the novel. She did not, of course.

The fictional history is best exemplified by the writing of Daniel Defoe, which generally dealt with familiar types of people in exotic but believable situations. The most popular of his works today is probably Robinson Crusoe, but he wrote an enormous number of other works of a similar character, including Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year. All of these works skillfully mixed truth and invention.

Other Forms: The Epistolary Novel: Defoe's "histories" were followed by a new form popularized by Samuel Richardson. Richardson took a technique established at least a century before and successfully applied it to the novel: he presented the entire story as a series of letters exchanged between the principal characters and their friends. Such a work, which we usually call an epistolary novel makes, like Defoe's confessions, great claims to authenticity. The documents are presented to the readers, and it is up to them to create the story for themselves. As you might imagine, the form had its limitations. The writer was forced to include, because of the demands of the form of a letter, a great deal of repetitive and useless information. Nevertheless, it was immensely popular form, and it remains popular.

More congenial and familiar is the work of Henry Fielding; however, even his novels offer modern readers some difficulties. The novel was still largely a package deal in Fielding's time--a combination of a variety of literary forms held loosely together by a plot line. Tom Jones, Fielding's most famous novel, was filled with elements of sermons, travelogues, as well as personal essays on a variety of topics, most largely irrelevant to the plot. It was not until the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century that the more stream-lined modern novel emerged--in the works of Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and eventually George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. In the following century, the present one that is drawing to a close, there has been an explosion of novel writing, and increased experiment with the form of the novel. Finally, in the 18^th century, the novel, emerged beginning, perhaps, with Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe and 1722 Moll Flanders--both clearly developed from the picaresque narrative, and both episodic, colourful, and scandalous. Both are more strongly unified than earlier narratives, the one by setting and situation, the other by character. Interestingly, the term "novel" was initially avoided. Association with novelle had led to the term being used in the 17^th century to describe romances sexual liasons. Defoe and others preferred the term "history"; indeed, early novelists were often careful to provide explanations for the existence of their texts, presenting them as journals, memoirs, or exchanges of letters.