EN201 The European Novel
Introduction: THE/EUROPEAN/NOVEL 5.10.11
1. NOVEL. A fictitious prose narrative or tale of considerable length (now usually one long
enough to fill one or more volumes), in which characters and actions representative of the
real life of past or present times are portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity.
In 17-18th c. freq. contrasted with a romance, as being shorter than this, and having more
relation to real life. (OED, 2nd edition)
2. The point about the novel […] is not just that it eludes definitions, but that it actively
undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes
and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together. You can find poetry and dramatic
dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number
of other literary modes. Virginia Woolf described it as ‘this most pliable of all forms’. The
novel quotes, parodies and transforms other genres, converting its literary ancestors into
mere components of itself in a kind of Oedipal vengeance on them. It is the queen of literary
genres in a rather less elevated sense of the word than one might hear around Buckingham
palace.
The novel is a mighty melting pot, a mongrel among literary thoroughbreds. There
seems to be nothing it cannot do. It can investigate a single human consciousness for eight
hundred pages. Or it can recount the adventures of an onion, chart the history of a family
over six generations, or recreate the Napoleonic wars. If it is a form particularly associated
with the middle class, it is partly because the ideology of that class centres on a dream of
total freedom from restraint. In a word in which God is dead, everything, so Dostoevsky
remarked, is permitted; and the same goes for a world in which the old autocratic order is
dead and the middle class reigns triumphant. The novel is an anarchic genre, since its rule is
not to have rules.
[…] Myths are cyclical and repetitive, while the novel appears excitingly unpredictable. In fact,
the novel has a finite repertoire of forms and motifs. But it is an extraordinary capacious one
even so. […] It is hard to say when the form first arose. […] Most commentators agree that the
novel has its roots in the literary form we know as romance. Indeed, these are roots that it
has never entirely cut. Novels are romances – but romances which have to negotiate the
prosaic world of modern civilisation […] If the novel is a romance, it is a disenchanted one,
which has nothing to learn about the baffled desires and recalcitrant realities.
[…] The novel presents us with a changing, concrete, open-ended history rather than a
closed symbolic universe. Time and narrative are of its essence. In the modern era, fewer and
fewer things are immutable, and every phenomenon, including the self, seems historical to its
roots. The novel is the form in which history goes all the way down.
Terry Eagleton, ‘What is a Novel?’, The English Novel: An Introduction (2005)
3. The Editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of
fiction in it.
Daniel Defoe, ‘Preface’ to Robinson Crusoe (1719)
4. As we are now entering upon a book, in which the course of our history will oblige us to
relate some matters of a more strange and surprising kind than any which have hitherto
occurred, it may not be amiss in the prolegomenous, or introductory chapter, to say
something of that species of writing which is called the marvellous. […] First then, I think, it
may very reasonably be required of every writer, that he keeps within the bounds of
possibility; and still remembers that what it is not possible for man to perform, it is scarce
possible for man to believe he did perform. […] we must keep likewise within the rules of
probability. […] To say the truth, if the historian will confine himself to what really happened,
and utterly reject any circumstance, which, tho’ never so well attested, he must be well
assured is false, he will sometime fall into
the marvellous, but never into the incredible. […] It is by falling into fiction, therefore, that we
generally offend against this rule, of deserting probability, which the historian seldom, if ever
quits, till he forsakes his character, and commences a writer of romance.
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (Bk 8, Ch 1) (1746)
5. I have diligently collected everything I have been able to discover concerning the story of
poor Werther, and here present it to you in the knowledge that you will be grateful for it.
You cannot deny your admiration and love for his spirit and character, nor your tears at his
fate.
And you, good soul, who feels a compulsive longing such as his, draw consolation
from his sorrows, and let this little book be your friend whenever through fate or through
your own fault you can find no closer companion.
Preface to Werther (trans Michael Hulse)
6. THE EDITOR TO THE READER
I wish very much that we had enough of our friend’s own testimony, concerning the last
remarkable days of his life, to render it unnecessary for me to interrupt this series of
preserved letters with narration.
I have seen it as my duty to gather precise information from the mouths of those
likely to be best acquainted with his history; it is a simple story, and all the accounts agree
except on a few insignificant details; though opinions and judgements vary with respect to
the fundamental attitudes of the people involved.
We have no alternative but conscientiously relate what repeated endeavours have
brought to light, to include letters written by the deceased, and to attend to even the
slightest scrap of paper we have found; especially as it is so difficult to discern the true and
peculiar motives of even a single action of men who are not of a common order.
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) (trans. Michael Hulse)
Recommended Reading
Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)
André Brink, The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino (1998)
Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1996)
Terry Eagleton, The English Novel (2005)
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1960, revsd. 2005)
Georg Lukács, - The Historical Novel (1962)
- Studies in European Realism (1950)
- The Theory of the Novel (1971)
Michael McKeon, - Theory of the novel: a historical approach (2000)
- The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (1987)
Franco Moretti, - The Novel Volume 1: History, Geography and Culture (2006)
- The Novel Volume Two: Forms and Themes (2006)
- An Atlas of the European novel, 1800-1900 (1998)
- The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987)
- Modern Epic : the world-system from Goethe to García Márquez (1996)
Martin Travers, An Introduction to Modern European Literature: From Romanticism to
Postmodernism (1998)
M Moses Valdez, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995)
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957)