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British Novel Origins & Evolution

The document discusses the origins and development of the British novel. It notes that while poems and dramas were early literary forms, the novel emerged in the mid-18th century. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in 1726 were early works that paved the way, but Samuel Richardson's 1747 novel Pamela is considered the first true British novel due to its focus on realism and examination of human character and emotions. The novel gained popularity in the late 18th century among the growing middle class who had more leisure time to read. Major novelists like Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne further established the novel form

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Ahmed Aloqaili
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61 views2 pages

British Novel Origins & Evolution

The document discusses the origins and development of the British novel. It notes that while poems and dramas were early literary forms, the novel emerged in the mid-18th century. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in 1726 were early works that paved the way, but Samuel Richardson's 1747 novel Pamela is considered the first true British novel due to its focus on realism and examination of human character and emotions. The novel gained popularity in the late 18th century among the growing middle class who had more leisure time to read. Major novelists like Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne further established the novel form

Uploaded by

Ahmed Aloqaili
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The British Novel

Lecture 1
Definition: A novel is a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically
representing character and action with some degree of realism.

*In English literature, poetry is viewed as the first known literary form then came
drama and then the novel in later periods. The first writings traced back to the Anglo-
Saxon and Medieval periods (for example Beowulf, and The Canterbury Tales) are
epic poems or narrative poems.
*The novel appears later in the mid-eighteenth century, and continues to develop up
to the present.
*The novel did not emerge in one day but has had a long history of development from
its first proto-types to its modern form.
*The Canterbury Tales tell fictitious stories and characters but they are not prose
narratives and their relevance is only to highlight the real beginning of the British
novel in the 18th century.

*In 1719, Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, and in 1726, Jonathan Swift wrote
Gulliver’ s travels, but for many critics both books are ‘almost’ novels but they did
not view them as marking the real beginning of the British novel.

*The decisive factor that helped give birth to the novel proper is realism. In fact the
new century has thrown aside the strange plots and ideas of previous works and
turned more to reasonable and immediate things.

*The writings of Addison and Steele (The Tatler, The Spectator: Satirical essays
written in realist prose) also helped towards the production of the novel.

* Defoe, Swift, Addison and Steele all paved the way towards the appearance in the
middle of the eighteenth century of what will be considered as the real first novel by
Samuel Richardson: Pamela. Written in the form of fictional letters, it is different
from mere stories of adventure and it examines the human heart and shows the effects
of human character. It was successful and became popular because it met with the
interest of readers especially ladies who could read about the life and feelings of a
typically English girl.
*The novel thus came into popular awareness towards the end of the 18th C. due to a
growing middle-class with more leisure time to read and money to buy books.

*The early English novels concerned themselves with complex, middle-class


characters struggling with their morality and life circumstances.

*Pamela was followed by the novels of Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews (1742) and
Tom Jones (1749).

*A new kind of picture of real life was drawn by Tobias Smollett in his picaresque
novels Roderick Random (1748) and Humphrey Clinker (1771) which give
interesting information about life and society in his time.

* A fourth novelist of importance in this period was Laurence Sterne. He made his
novels original and confusing because he uses a strange manner of prose and structure
as he seems to dislike order and common sense and to see that life itself does not
contain much of it. but his first Tristam Shandy (1760) and second novel A
Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) both draw clear and realistic
characters.

*Another important novel of the time was The Vicar of Wakefield (1751) by Oliver
Goldsmith.

*In the second half of the century, some novelists deviated from the tradition of the
realist novel and started a new type of novel containing strange settings and events.
Hence, Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764) about the 12th and the
13th centuries showing impossible events , such as the destruction of a castle by an
immense ghost inside it.

*This was an ancestor of the Novel of Terror, it was followed by Vathek (1786) by
William Beckford. This novel tells us about Vathek, the grandson of Harun Al-Rashid
who becomes the servant of Eblis, the devil. He visited Eblis in the underworld where
all the promises he got were false and he was punished for his crimes with terrible
pain.

*The novel of terror was further developed with a work of better quality by Ann
Radcliffe The Mysteries od Udolpho (1794) .

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