Novel

3 Key excerpts on "Novel"

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  eBook - ePub

  Researching Interpretive Talk Around Literary Narrative Texts

  Shared Novel Reading

  • John Gordon(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The subtle possibilities of narration from the perspective of a narrator offer the reader myriad opportunities for subjective response, from empathy through circumspection to credulity and evaluation. In considering how narrators frame their stories and in judging the veracity of their version of events, readers of Novels enter into ontological and epistemological reflection not simply relative to the narrator’s expression in the text but also as they articulate their own perception. The Novel thus constitutes a powerful educational device where students of literature enter such a dialogue: each Novel offers a sounding board for exploring and articulating what it means to say, to know and to be. Narrative voice in the Novel often takes a form akin to the mundane (in the sense of daily, not pejoratively) expressions of our lives, as we recount experiences and attempt to convey to others our subjectivity in relation to their own, and as our subjectivity enters the public sphere in verbal anecdote, gossip and explanation. Where Novelists such as Thackeray and Dickens deploy omniscient narration, or where Henry James gives us access to the point of view of individual characters, we can attempt nuanced thinking about what it means to be someone else. The work of later Novelists makes us acutely aware of the difficulties of conveying experience in language and narrative form, as in the work of Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner and their use ‘stream of consciousness’. In their innovations these writers and many since have drawn our attention to the formulaic nature of conventional narrative forms and their construction.

  3.3 Novels in Education

  The persistent study of Novels in formal education may seem bizarre in an era where the Novel is sometimes considered a dying or ailing form, the form no more than a ‘tissue of signs’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 146). The purported residing importance of the Novel in society is expressed in the assertion that ‘the history of the Novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same’ (Armstrong, 2005, p. 3) and in the assumption that ‘the Novel participates in all sorts of social processes, helping to found the modern nation, to consolidate overseas empires, to advance industrial capitalism, to enforce sexual difference, and, more generally to produce and police the subject’ (Ortiz-Robles, 2010, p.2).

  The Novel form may also be considered an expression of situated knowledge. The literariness of literary fiction rests on authors’ ability to realise original, unique worlds and ways of knowing in narratives that somehow resonate for readers. The Novel is an aesthetic device which invites readers to orient to ontologies inherent in narrative voice, concurrently offering distinctive ways of knowing, epistemology by story. The pedagogy of shared Novel reading shapes for student readers a distinctive ontology, situating their dialogic relationships with narratives in the space of the classroom (Wells, 1999). Texts are voiced and heard as well as decoded from the page. Interactive mediation realises the compelling momentum of episodic narratives, fostering students’ emotional development through empathetic response to represented experiences and psychologies of characters and narrators (Harding, 1962; Meek & Watson, 2003; Spencer, 1982, p. 21; Spencer, Warlow, & Barton, 1977, p. 112). Such mediation realises reading that Rosenblatt (1978) considered both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘transactional’, where readers ‘to some extent create’ texts even as they are guided by them (p. 119). Rosenblatt challenged the assumption that the ‘author’s reconstructed intention’ (p. 113) is the only meaning of a text read aesthetically.

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  30-Second Literature

  The 50 most important forms, genres and styles, each explained in half a minute

  • Ella Berthoud(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Ivy Press

    (Publisher)

  Don Quixote (1615), frequently cited as the first modern Novel, was shaped by that debate.

  3-SECOND PLOT

  The earliest form to be concerned with the inner life of a character, the Novel’s elastic length allows scope for the character’s development over time.

  3-MINUTE THEME

  In the tenth century, ceramic movable characters developed in China for printing allowed for the development of the Novel in that region. In Europe it was not until 1450 that Johannes Gutenberg developed movable individual letter blocks for roman script, allowing mass production of printed material. Initially, large sheets of printed and folded paper, known as chapbooks, sold in millions across Europe, but their popularity would later be eclipsed by the Novel.

  RELATED TOPICS

  See also

  EARLY LITERATURE MEDIEVAL LITERATURE EPIC POEM

  3-SECOND BIBLIOGRAPHY

  THE GOLDEN ASS

  ca. 150 CE

  Lucius Apuleius

  ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS fourteenth century

  Luo Guanzhong

  ROBINSON CRUSOE 1719

  Daniel Defoe

  TRISTRAM SHANDY 1759

  Laurence Sterne

  30-SECOND TEXT

  Ella Berthoud

  Gutenberg’s invention of movable type paved the way for Novels like Robinson Crusoe to be read globally .

  EPISTOLARY Novel

  the 30-second thesis

  A Novel written in the form of letters allows for the expression of multiple intimate viewpoints without interference from an authorial voice. One of the first kinds of Novel, the epistolary form emerged from the universal habit of writing letters, with Prison of Love (ca. 1485) by Diego de San Pedro, in which a large number of letters create much of the intensely romantic narrative, being the earliest-known example of the form. Epistolary Novels are of three basic types: monologic, where the letters are all from one person, such as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004); dialogic, with letters between two people, such as Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970); and polylogic, with three or more letter-writing characters, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In the eighteenth century, the form was lampooned for its heavy moralizing content, notably with Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741), a parody of Samuel Richardson’s widely read Pamela (1740), in which the narrator is found scribbling letters under the most ridiculous circumstances; such mockery did not diminish the popularity of similar Novels of the time. More recently, authors have seized on email, text and Post-it notes as rich new formats for epistolary exchange, as in Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette

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  Contesting the Monument: The Anti-illusionist Italian Historical Novel: No. 10

  The Anti-illusionist Italian Historical Novel

  • Ruth Glynn(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This approach to generic change is particularly appealing to an analysis of the twentieth-century Italian historical Novel because so many of the Novels under examination in this study display a ready willingness to dialogue with both immediate predecessors and early ancestors. Much recent historical fiction plays upon the themes, motifs and topics of earlier historical Novels, frequently with the intention of creating new understandings of the earlier works. On occasion direct allusions are made to the ancestral relatives of the new work, most frequently with reference to Manzoni's canonic text, but references to previous Novels also recur to a significant extent within the Sicilian context. In addition, many of the Novels under examination are concerned with the notion of intertextual dialogue and theories of the circularity of knowledge, whereby the relation of influence between the past and the present may be equally considerable in either direction. Finally, the innovative incorporation of inter-generic concepts (from the disparate fields of historiography, artistic representation, semiotics, etc.) adds to the body of stimuli which may dramatically alter and renew the literary conventions of the genre.

  Towards a Theory of the Historical Novel

  Any attempt to define the limits of a literary genre falls prey to inherent dangers. As generic definitions per se tend towards an inventory of thematic and formal recurrences abstracted from the observation of a body of text or extrapolated from a work of extraordinary literary import, the methodology assumes an interpretative positioning outside of the inherent historicity of the literary structure: an absolute post rem with respect to the history of the genre itself. Yet, as I have outlined above, genres and their individual textual members are dynamic units, in continuous dialogue with one another and in a constant state of alteration. Each text within a genre, by providing its own peculiarities, promotes changes that affect the entire genre, leading to a revision of the constituent elements and preventing the genre from becoming a rigid receptacle, incapable of evolution and transformation.

  I therefore wish to preface the presentation of my own theory of the historical Novel with a tempering of the normally rigid and prescriptive nature of generic definition. The employment of the term 'theorizing' in the title of this chapter serves to suggest that generic definition is, and will always be, a work in progress. The following theoretical deliberations are intended to provide a provisional ordering system, avoiding prescriptive or absolute conclusions, but seeking pragmatically to enable precise critical judgements to emerge. In this way, I hope to avoid the creation of a totalizing generic definition, favouring instead a conditional, contextualized position.

  The term 'historical Novel' does not facilitate easy definition. On the most basic level, it denotes a work of art which incorporates both real and fictitious past personae and which attempts to narrate by fictitious means the events of a real, existing past. It is therefore a hybrid genre, a narrative construct situated uneasily between history and fiction, and torn between external reference and internal autonomy. In practice, the possibilities offered by such a narrative construct are vast, as a brief historical overview of the genre will reveal.

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