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Lecture 2 - Prose Fiction

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61 views3 pages

Lecture 2 - Prose Fiction

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smando samad
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Miss BENIA 1st Year - Group 5, 6

Lecture 2: Prose Fiction:


- Prose:
Prose is the most typical form of language and it is derived from the Latin word prosa which literally
means ‘straight-forward.’ It is like talking to someone in a straight- forward manner and not in a sing-
song or poetic way. This means that anything you say or write in prose is presented in a straight-
forward manner.
Words in prose are arranged in correct sentences and in a logical sequence for a meaningful
understanding of the intended communication. In view of this, Samuel Taylor Coleridge insists in his
definition of prose and poetry that; “prose is —words in their best order;
- Fiction
Fiction is derived from the Latin word fictum which means “created”. Fiction is a term used to denote
anything, mainly stories or accounts that are not real.Can you recall the fairy tale or other stories that
your mother or grandmother used to tell you about animals, monsters, or even human beings that
existed in faraway countries or in the primordial times. These are fictional narratives. Fiction is
therefore any form of narrative which deals, in part or in whole, with events that are not factual, but
rather, are imaginary and invented by its author.
- What then is prose fiction?
It is fictional work that is presented in a narrative form.
Fiction and narrative are words that distinguish prose fiction from any other form of narrative or
fictional work. For instance, drama is fiction but it is presented in dialogue and not narrative. Prose
fiction as a literary genre is made up of the short story, the novella and the novel. Prose fiction tells a
story and the fact that the story is not factual distinguishes it from history.
Prose fiction is an artistic work that “has a personal narrative, a hero to identify with
fictional inventions, style, and suspense – in short anything that might be handled with the
rather personal ventures of creativity and artistic freedom” (Kermode 23). It may exaggerate or distort
facts or the story may be completely an invention of the writer. It depends on the style of the writer
and or what the writer wants to achieve. The story in prose fiction is invented by the writer but is
presented in a realistic manner.
It is a literary genre that presents human experience to educate and entertain the readers.
It tells a story that deals with cultural, social and political issues in the world but the characters are not
real (known) human beings but bear human traits and dispositions. Although the story in prose fiction
is fictitious, it contains identifiable characters, locations and incidents and these add to make the story
that is presented as realistic as possible. Prose fiction is different from history which is a documentation
of past realistic events.
Definition of the novel
According to a critic, a novel is a novel “if it is fictional, if it is in prose, and if it is of a certain length.”2
Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals
imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a
group of persons in a specific setting.
The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus, a late
variant of novus, meaning “new”).

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Miss BENIA 1st Year - Group 5, 6

the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience. It attempts to assume those burdens of life
that have no place in the epic poem and to see man as unheroic, unredeemed, imperfect, even absurd.
Emergence of the novel:
Let’s go back to a time when the novel really was new. Once upon a time, there weren’t any novels.
There were other things that were narrative and lengthy—epics, religious or historical narratives of the
tribe, prose or verse romances, nonfictional narratives like travel hournals.
The rise of the novel coincides with the rise of the modern world—exploration, discovery, invention,
development, oppression, industrialization, exploitation, conquest, and violence—and that’s no
coincidence. It took more than movable type to make the novel possible; it took a new age.
Rightly or wrongly, there are two novels we generally think of as the “first”—and they’re seventy years
apart. In 1678 someone, perhaps Madame de La Fayette, published a little novel of profound
significance. Its popularity was such that people lined up at the publishers waiting, sometimes for
months, for their copies. Take that, Harry Potter. The book is called La Princesse de Clèves, and its
chief claim to fame is not as a first novel but as the first roman d’analyse, a novel of analysis, a book
that investigates emotions and mental states, pushing well beyond the mere conveying of plot.
At the yonder end of the century, 1605 to be exact, a book came out that really set the world on its ear:
Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It’s goofy and serious, hilarious and sad, satiric and original. And
it’s first. Cervantes shows everyone else what might be done
The novel in Britain
In the 18th century, a print culture was emerging there for the first time: new technologies allowed for
a wider circulation of written materials, and for the transmission of this reproducible, portable, and
even purchasable commodity. Furthermore, although the eighteenth century was by no means an era
of universal literacy, the novel differed from earlier literary forms because it was produced outside elite
systems of aristocratic patronage, subscription, and private circulation.
Critics consider Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as the first English novel.
Why the novel?
The novel matters because of its closeness to the real world; over the last three centuries, many claims
for the novel’s significance have rested on exactly this sense that, among all the literary forms, the
novel – for better or worse – has an especially intimate relationship to ordinary life. As the novelist
Milan Kundera has recently put it: “‘Prose’: the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also
signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life. So to say that the novel is the art of prose is
not to state the obvious; the word defines the deep sense of that art.”
Why were novels considered dangerous? novels instill intellectual frivolity, and mislead the young into
believing they know how the world works. These common eighteenth-century claims help to explain
what was so unusual about the novel when it first appeared in English: its seductive proximity to the
real world.
So those books we call novels were felt to be different from the fanciful romances of earlier centuries,
even if, somewhat confusingly, you often find the terms “romance” and “novel” used interchangeably
in the eighteenth century (as in the title of Reeve’s own book, The Progress of Romance).
On this view, novels were distinctively dangerous because distinctively realistic: this new type of
narrative fiction, with its complex characters, its recognizable settings, and its broadly credible
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Miss BENIA 1st Year - Group 5, 6

sequence of events, might dupe the sequestered and susceptible into believing it a reliable guide to the
world.
Q. Why do you think the novel is still popular even today?
Much of the continuing appeal of the novel lies in its collaborative nature; readers invest themselves
in the characters’ stories, becoming actively involved in the creation of meaning. At the same time,
they are rewarded by pleasures that are more intimate than the essentially vicarious genres of drama
and film. That give-and-take between creator and audience starts in the first line, runs through the last
word, and causes the novel to stay in our minds long after we close the cover.

Assignment: What are the genres of the novel?

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