I.

Introduction

Novel, long work of written fiction. Most novels involve many characters and tell a complex story by placing the characters in a number of different situations.

Because novels are long—generally 200 pages or more—novelists can tell more richly detailed tales than can authors of briefer literary forms such as the short story. Many readers consider the novel the most flexible type of literature, and thus the one with the most possibilities. For example, writers can produce novels that have the tension of a drama, the scope of an epic poem, the type of commentary found in an essay, and the imagery and rhythm of a lyric poem. Over the centuries writers have continually experimented with the novel form, and it has constantly evolved in new directions.

The word novel came into use during the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century), when Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio applied the term novella to the short prose narratives in his Il decamerone (1353; Ten Day’s Work). When his tales were translated, the term novel passed into the English language. The word novella is now used in English to refer to short novels.

II.

What Is a Novel?

Writers have pushed traditional literary boundaries so that the characteristics of many types of literature overlap, but looking at certain differences between novels and other literary forms can give readers a basic guide to the novel’s distinctive traits.

Like the short story, the novel tells a story, but unlike the short story, it presents more than an episode. In a novel, the writer has the freedom to develop plot, characters, and theme slowly. The novelist can also surround the main plot with subplots that flesh out the tale. Unlike short stories, most novels have numerous shifts in time, place, and focus of interest.

Like epic poetry, the novel may celebrate grand designs or great events, but unlike epic poetry it also may pay attention to details of everyday life, such as people's daily tasks and social obligations. For example, the epic the Iliad by ancient Greek poet Homer depicts the Trojan War in grand terms but does not comment on the experience of the common soldiers. By contrast, in his novel Madame Bovary (1857), French writer Gustave Flaubert shows the main character shopping and worrying about household expenses.

Like a playwright, a novelist tells a story, but a novelist has more freedom than a playwright to portray events outside the framework of the immediate story, such as historical events that happen at the same time as the story. The playwright is more limited in this way because description in dramas is generally conveyed through dialogue between characters. In a play, rarely does a narrator speak directly to the audience, as the narrator of a novel can. Novelists can also make smoother changes in time and place than can playwrights, who must write their works so that they can be performed on stage.

Like the people in the Bible, the novel’s characters may search for God and have their own particular dreams and ideals, but unlike many biblical characters, the characters in novels are generally presented as people without spiritual missions and destinies. For example, in the Bible, the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah call on the Hebrew people to live more righteously. By contrast, although the character Levin in Anna Karenina (1875-1877) by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is obsessed with the moral life, he is also a farmer, thinker, husband, and society man who must attend to the needs of everyday life.

Unlike writers of allegories or parables, novelists do not use characters solely as emblems. The biblical parable of the prodigal son, which tells of a man who forgives his son for the errors of his ways, explores ideas of Christian forgiveness but does not investigate the characters of the family members in great detail. By contrast, the works of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which also explore themes of forgiveness, demonstrate the anguish of guilt-ridden men and women. In Dostoyevsky’s Prestuplanie i nakazanie (1866; Crime and Punishment) a man commits a murder and escapes punishment from authorities. However, he still suffers because his own conscience is burdened by the knowledge of the wrong he has done.

Finally, the novel may adapt patterns of mythology, but the novelist does not simply retell the myth. Instead, the novelist structures the story around the underlying themes of the myth while featuring unique characters and settings. In Ulysses (1922) by Irish writer James Joyce, the experiences of the character Leopold Bloom have some similarity to those of the hero Odysseus in the Odyssey by ancient Greek poet Homer. But Bloom’s experiences take place entirely within his world—the Ireland of his time. Joyce thus uses the ancient material of Odysseus’s mythical experiences to create a new interpretation of contemporary experience.

III.

Elements of the Novel

To create a fictional world that seems real to the reader, novelists use five main elements: plot, characters, conflict, setting, and theme.

The plot is the novel’s story and its underlying meaning. Therefore, when a reader describes the plot of a novel, the reader should describe both what happens to the characters and the meaning of these events. Plots can be anything the writer dreams up, from narratives so realistic that they seem like nonfiction to tales of the fantastic, such as science-fiction works that involve distant worlds.

To engage the reader, a novel must feature characters with complex and complete personalities. Characters do not need to be physically realistic; science-fiction novels often feature aliens as characters. But meaningful characters usually have hopes, fears, concerns, and ambitions that the reader can recognize. Well-conceived characters do not simply serve as devices to further the plot; they convince the reader that they have lives beyond the boundaries of the particular story being told.

The novelist makes the reader care about the story by introducing some sort of conflict. The conflict can be physical, emotional, or ethical, but it always creates some sort of tension that the characters must resolve.

Another element that the novelist uses to draw in the reader is the setting of the work—the time and place that the story occurs. For some novelists, setting is essential and plays a major role in the book’s theme, as in a novel that is about life in the American South. For other authors, the setting is not as important—for example, in a book that focuses on the inner thoughts of a single character.

The theme of a novel is the major idea that the novelist is setting forth in writing the book. The theme gives the novel greater depth than it would have if it were a simple recitation of a series of actions. An author uses the other elements of the novel to build the work’s theme. For example, to develop a theme about the current state of the American South, an author might set the book in the South, feature characters from the South, and have the characters speak in a Southern style. Through these elements, along with the plot, the novelist conveys the novel’s theme.

A.

Plot

The plot of a novel is the narrative and thematic development of the story—that is, what happens and what these events mean. English novelist E. M. Forster, author of works such as A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), referred to the plot as a “narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” By this statement he meant that plot is a series of events that depend on one another, not a sequence of unrelated episodes.

There are several types of plots. An episodic plot features distinct episodes that are related to one another but that can also be read individually, almost as stories by themselves. Most novels involve more complex plots, in which the story builds on itself so that each episode evolves out of a previous one and produces another one. Some plots are based less on the physical action of events than on the emotional reactions of characters and their efforts to communicate their feelings to others. And some novelists experiment with plot, interrupting the main story with subplots, moving back and forth in time, or merging fact with fiction.

A.1.

Episodic Plots

Many of the earliest novels had episodic plots. One of the first was Lazarillo de Tormes (1554; Lazaro of Tormes), an anonymous Spanish work that follows the adventures of a rogue. This novel and others with rogues as the main characters are called picaresque novels.

Another Spanish novel with an episodic plot became one of the world’s best-known literary works. Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes follows the travels of a Spanish nobleman who encounters adventures and misfortunes after he strikes out to combat the world’s injustices. Although the novel has a plot, it is structured so that if the reader skips an episode, he or she can still follow Don Quixote’s progress with little loss of understanding.

American writer Mark Twain used an episodic plot in his classic novel Huckleberry Finn (1884), about Huck Finn, a boy who runs away from his hometown and voyages down the Mississippi River on a raft with an escaped slave named Jim. The episodes in Huckleberry Finn revolve around the points when Huck and Jim leave their raft and meet people in the towns and villages that border the river. In between these episodes, they retreat to their raft and contemplate their experiences as they drift south on the water.

A more complicated type of episodic novel is the bildungsroman, a novel about the early years of a person’s life, or a person’s moral or psychological growth. (The term comes from the German for “education novel.”) The bildungsroman traces not adventures but stages of growth in the life of a character. Famous novels of this type include David Copperfield (1849-1850), in which English novelist Charles Dickens traces David’s life from childhood misery to worldly success, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in which Irish novelist James Joyce records Stephen Dedalus’s emergence as a man and as an artist. Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) by American author Paule Marshall describes the teenage years of Selina Boyce, who grows up in Brooklyn, New York, as the child of immigrants from Barbados. In All the Pretty Horses (1992) by American author Cormac McCarthy, 16-year-old John Grady Cole and two companions travel from Texas to Mexico, where their adventures become rites of passage to manhood.

A.2.

Complex Plots

Many novels have more complex plots that follow more than one major character or have more than one major story line. A classic example of a novel with a complex plot is Voina i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace) by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. This book is concerned with the histories of five families from 1805 to 1814 and with the Russian military campaign against the invading French army led by Napoleon I. The book features aristocrats and peasants, officers and common soldiers, diplomats and courtiers, town life and country life, flirtations, galas, hunting, and harshly realistic scenes of clashing armies.

The subject matter that novels with complex plot can cover is almost limitless. Some novels, like War and Peace, cover all segments of society. Others, such as Pride and Prejudice (1813) by English author Jane Austen, cover narrower subject matter. Austen’s novel is set in roughly the same time period as War and Peace. However, Pride and Prejudice focuses on one upper-class family, the Bennets, and in particular on the Bennet daughters’ search for husbands.

Subject matter continues to vary widely in contemporary novels. One contemporary example of a complex plot is the science-fiction novel Neuromancer (1984) by Canadian author William Gibson. This novel describes a world dominated by technology in which the main characters struggle against a dehumanizing social system. A very different type of novel is The God of Small Things (1997) by Indian author Arundhati Roy. This dreamlike saga set in the Indian state of Kerala chronicles the downfall of a well-to-do family. Despite significant differences in genre and subject matter between these two late-20th-century novels, they both can be classified as complex-plot novels.

A.3.

Plots Focusing on Character

Another kind of plot relies more on character than on action. Little action happens, but the subtle quality of the few events and, more crucially, the characters' feelings about them, form the essence of the story. Madame Bovary (1857) by French novelist Gustave Flaubert, for example, traces Emma Bovary’s problems in three relationships as her marriage degenerates and her two lovers betray her. Everything in the novel arises from the conflict between her romantic ideals about life and the realities of her middle-class existence.

American writer Henry James uses a very simple plot in The Ambassadors (1903), which also focuses on character. Lambert Strether, a middle-aged New Englander, travels to Paris, France, to fetch a young man whose mother is worried about what seems to her to be Europe's decadent influence. The “ambassador,” Strether, falls under the spell of the city and becomes enchanted with the young man’s mistress. Instead of sending explanations back to the United States, Strether spends his time exploring Europe; the book’s plot focuses on his development as an individual.

The Death of the Heart (1938) by Irish author Elizabeth Bowen concentrates on a young girl’s coming of age and her encounter with the insensitivity of both a lover and her own relatives. The Bone People (1983) by New Zealand writer Keri Hulme looks intensely at the relationship a woman forms with a boy and his adoptive father. The novel’s theme is that the relationships among the three influence each one individually. Although several crucial events occur, the focus remains on the three characters and their interaction.

A.4.

Experiments with Plots

Some authors experiment with plot by not providing a clearly definable beginning, middle, and end to the story. In Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) by English novelist Laurence Sterne, Tristram himself does not appear until well into the novel. Meanwhile, the reader receives the opinions of the characters Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy instead. The book also dwells on small details and meditates aloud about itself, as in the narrator’s reflections at the beginning of Chapter 11, Book 2:

In the 20th century writers began to alter the flow of the plot more often. Ulysses (1922) by Irish writer James Joyce is a novel set in Dublin, Ireland, that focuses on the young writer Stephen Dedalus and the married couple Leopold and Molly Bloom. Joyce crowds his plot with details of Dublin life and the random thoughts of his characters. In the end, Joyce leaves several mysteries about his characters unresolved, and he does not tell what happens to the two central heroes, Stephen and Leopold.

American writer William Gaddis experimented with plot in one of his best-known novels, JR (1975), by telling the story of an 11-year-old business mogul solely through dialogue. Playing with the structure of time is another way authors experiment with plot. In Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966) by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, the preface gives instructions as to the varying orders in which the parts of the novel can be read, offering the reader several different possibilities in terms of plot.

American writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. experimented with time in a different way in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). This novel is about a man who comes “unstuck in time” and moves back and forth to different moments in his life. Dominican-born author Julia Alvarez experimented with time but stayed within the bounds of realism in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). Alvarez moves her plot backward through time rather than forward. Each successive chapter describes an earlier point in the characters’ lives.

Some novelists blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, as American author Truman Capote did in his novel In Cold Blood (1966), an account of the murder of four family members. Capote termed the book a nonfiction novel. Other writers tell a story from several different points of view, drawing attention to the plot as an element at the whim and mercy of the author. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier used this approach in El acoso (1956; Manhunt, 1959), about a man trying to escape from his political enemies.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, authors began to experiment with plot by using computers to create so-called hypertext works, which are collections of separate computer files that are linked so that readers can easily jump from one file to another. The reader begins with one file and makes choices about which links to access and read. Hypertext works thus allow the reader to determine the course of the story. With many possible choices at each stage, these works have a great number of potential plot lines. Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, emerged as a center for hypertext writing, in part because Robert Coover, one of the major novelists in the hypertext movement, became a member of Brown’s English department faculty.

B.

Characters

The characters of a book are the fictional figures who move through the plot. They are invented by the author and are made of words rather than of flesh and blood. Therefore they cannot be expected to have all the attributes of real human beings. Nevertheless, novelists do try to create fictional people whose situations affect the reader as the situations of real people would.

Authors describe the more simple characters in novels with no more than a few phrases that identify the character’s most important traits. These characters have little capacity for personal growth, and they appear in the novel as limited but necessary elements of the plot. Despite their small parts, such characters are often vivid. The ingratiating, hypocritically “[h]‘umble” Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (1849-1850) by English novelist Charles Dickens is memorable in a way that more complex characters are not. Another simple Dickens character is Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), a conformist whose character Dickens captures completely by describing him as someone who will say nothing that would “bring a blush into the cheek of [a] young person.” Although characters such as Heep and Podsnap are severely limited and could not carry a narrative by themselves, they provide a mechanism for the novelist to portray certain ideas or points of view.

A more complex type of character is the mythic figure, who corresponds to an individual from ancient myth or to a shared human experience that is handed down in myths and stories. For example, in the novella The Bear (1942) by American author William Faulkner, the main character, Ike McCaslin, is introduced to his family’s tradition of hunting. His experiences represent the ancient theme of initiation into the hunt, which has been an aspect of human societies for thousands of years. Some modern novelists reinterpret ancient myths and give new attention to characters. In Grendel (1971), American author John Gardner retells the medieval Anglo-Saxon tale Beowulf, in which the hero Beowulf slays the monster Grendel. Gardner’s novel tells the same story, but it is cast from the point of view of the monster. Gardner’s version explores Grendel’s feelings, doubts, and longings.

To create complex, realistic characters, authors usually combine traits that do not correspond to any single real person, but are aspects of several people. To give these characters motives for their actions, authors highlight the characters’ thoughts, feelings, conflicting impulses, and capacity for change. For example, in Anna Karenina (1875-1877) by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, the main character is torn between her stable yet dull marriage and a passionate yet dangerous affair with a military officer. In the end, Anna suffers a tragic fate as her society denounces her affair and turns its back on her.

Richly textured and detailed characters who are strongly affected by events in their lives, like Anna, exist in works throughout the history of the novel, but they especially flourished in the 19th century. With specific tastes and traits, these characters appear to the reader fully realized as true-to-life individuals. Famous 19th-century literary characters include Emma Woodhouse, the willful, witty, and playful main character in Emma (1816) by English author Jane Austen; Emma Bovary, an extravagant and sensual woman in Madame Bovary (1857) by French novelist Gustave Flaubert; and Dorothea Brooke, who loses her idealism in Middlemarch (1871-1872) by English writer George Eliot.

In the 20th century, experiments with stream of consciousness, a literary technique in which authors represent the flow of sensations and ideas, added to the depth of character portrayal. English novelist Virginia Woolf followed this approach to explore the characters of an Englishwoman and a young former soldier in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Sometimes stream of consciousness challenges the reader. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf achieves a deliberately disorienting effect by moving subtly from character to character, from past to present, and from external events to internal thoughts.

The absence of firmly stamped characters is a feature of the nouveau roman (new novel), a type of novel that developed in France in the 1950s. In the nouveau roman form, characters are only vaguely defined, because the “new novelists” believed that there is no objective truth, only subjective impressions that change depending on viewpoint. An example of a nouveau roman is La jalousie (1957; Jealousy, 1959) by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Other novelists move in the opposite direction and place true-life people in their works, attempting to portray the people in great detail. For his In Cold Blood (1966), Truman Capote researched the lives of two murderers and wrote their story as a chilling study of personality and motive. Capote’s book traces its ancestry to A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by English novelist Daniel Defoe, a novel based on real accounts that involves both actual and imagined victims of a real-life plague that occurred in 1665 in London, England.

Novels such as Defoe’s that use historical settings for fictional characters are distinguished from historical novels that attempt to describe the inner lives of historical figures. In Voina i Mir (1865-1869; War and Peace), Russian writer Leo Tolstoy not only grounds his story firmly in the era of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), but also portrays French emperor Napoleon I directly, placing the reader in Napoleon’s mind by describing the emperor’s thoughts about the glory of Moscow as he stands before the city.

Some novelists use historical figures not as main characters but as elements of a backdrop to a fictional story. American writer E. L. Doctorow takes this approach in Ragtime (1975), a book about three families in early-20th-century America. The novel features appearances by public figures such as magician Harry Houdini and businessman J. P. Morgan.

C.

Conflict

The plot of a novel unfolds as the novel’s characters deal with conflict. The conflict may be of various types. It may be physical, as in Red Badge of Courage (1895) by American author Stephen Crane, in which a young man goes to battle during the American Civil War (1861-1865). The conflict may be ethical and involve making decisions that affect other people. In All the King’s Men (1946), American novelist Robert Penn Warren depicts this kind of conflict by focusing on the effect an ambitious Southern politician named Willie Stark has upon his assistant, Jack Burden, and others. The conflict in a novel may also be emotional. A Death in the Family (1957) by American writer James Agee is about a family recovering from the death of a loved one.

Many conflicts in novels occur between two characters. For example, Les misérables (1862) by French novelist Victor Hugo is about an obsessive policeman named Javert who pursues the character Valjean. Intruder in the Dust (1948) by American novelist William Faulkner features a different sort of conflict, between a small group of characters and the rest of local society. In the book, which is set in the American South, a black man, Lucas Beauchamp, is accused of murder. A white boy, his black friend, and an elderly woman help Beauchamp prove his innocence.

Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes describes conflict between an individual and society. The novel is the comic story of a nobleman who continually misinterprets his encounters with other people and thus has a unique view of his society. Conflict in novels can also occur between social groups, as in Germinal (1885) by French novelist Émil Zola, a work about a group of miners who try to better their lot in life.

Conflict can also occur within a character’s own mind, as that character struggles internally. La chute (1956; The Fall, 1957) by French writer Albert Camus is about a lawyer who lives without questioning his actions until a moment of personal revelation sets him forever to doubting himself. Another novel that features a character with inner turmoil is The Moviegoer (1961) by American author Walker Percy. The novel’s main character, Binx Bolling, is a stockbroker searching for meaning in his life.

Most novelists draw the reader in by having the novel’s conflict develop over time. The reader sees the situation that provokes the conflict, the development of the conflict from episode to episode, and then the climax and the resolution of the conflict. As the tension builds toward the main conflict, the author may introduce subplots that create and resolve other points of conflict. Some novelists reverse the reader’s expectations by describing the aftermath of the story, then going back in time to reveal how the characters arrived at that point.

D.

Setting

The setting of a novel—the time and place of its action—is crucial to the creation of a complete work. Physical places such as deserts and outer space, as well as cultural settings such as hospitals and universities, help determine characters’ conflicts, aspirations, and destinies.

In the 19th century, writers such as Honoré de Balzac of France, Ivan Turgenev of Russia, and Charles Dickens of England provided great amounts of detail when describing their novels’ settings, and they did so for specific reasons. In Balzac’s Père Goriot (1834; Old Goriot), the main character arrives in Paris and finds lodging at a boarding house, the Maison Vauquer. The house’s shabby furniture and stained linens represent the struggles of lower-middle-class life. In Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons), Turgenev distinguishes between two kinds of country families by contrasting the elegance and the earthiness of their respective households. The ominousness of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861) proceeds as much from the bleak marshes and the Gothic house owned by the character Miss Havisham as from anything the characters say or do.

Some novelists pay less attention to specific physical objects. English writer Jane Austen, for example, is less concerned with items in a room than Dickens is, but this does not mean she is not concerned with social environment. In focusing, rather precisely, on details such as Mr. Bennet’s income in Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Mr. Eliot’s background in Persuasion (1818), she creates an atmosphere in which a character’s background and home town—whether London, the town of Meryton, or somewhere in northern England—becomes central to the story.

Sometimes novelists make time and place so essential to the narrative that they become as important as the characters themselves. Often this occurs when novels are set in a single, distinctive location. For example, Wuthering Heights (1847) by English novelist Emily Brontë, The Scarlet Letter (1850) by American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) by English novelist Thomas Hardy are inconceivable without their settings of Stonehenge, colonial New England, and the Yorkshire moors, respectively.

American author William Faulkner set The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and many other works in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. Characters featured in one book also show up as characters in other works, drawing all the works together as what is called the Yoknapatawpha saga.

The novel Jazz (1992) by American author Toni Morrison is set in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. This cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s featured innovations in literature, theater, art, and music. The setting Morrison creates is integral to the book, whose narrative voice echoes the loose, unpredictable rhythms of the jazz music of the time.

E.

Theme

A novel’s theme is the main idea that the writer expresses. Theme can also be defined as the underlying meaning of the story.

The theme of a novel is more than its subject matter, because an author’s technique can play as strong a role in developing a theme as the actions of the characters do. For example, American novelist Wright Morris explores the interaction of the past and present in his work The Field of Vision (1956), which is set at a bullfight in Mexico. Morris’s technique is to use the bullfight’s action as a trigger that causes each of the five characters, all American spectators, to remember events from the past.

Rarely can a novel’s theme be interpreted in only one way. Because of the length of novels, and the various characters, conflicts, and scenes found within them, readers can look at different aspects of the work to uncover different interpretations of the meaning of the tale. British novelist Lawrence Durrell demonstrated this in his series of novels The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960), which is intended to be experienced not as a series of individual novels but as a single work. The collection looks at life in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II (1939-1945). In the four books, Durrell offers different perspectives on roughly the same actions.

A common theme in novels is the conflict between appearance and reality. For example, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by American writer Carson McCullers concerns John Singer, a man who cannot speak or hear. Nevertheless, he serves as a sort of confessor to a group of neighbors. These people idealize him as a listener—“Each man described the mute as they wished him to be”—and unburden themselves by speaking to him. However, the reality is that Singer cannot understand the people and that they do not understand him; they are bewildered when he commits suicide.

Another common theme is the search for personal identity. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by American writer J. D. Salinger convincingly depicts Holden Caulfield, a teenager who realizes that he is no longer a child, but who is not quite ready for adulthood. Holden’s desperate search for identity has captured the imagination of generations of adolescent readers.

The theme of an individual who strikes out alone to face the world is used in many works. One of the most famous instances is in Huckleberry Finn (1884) by American novelist Mark Twain. The book, set before the American Civil War (1861-1865), is about a boy, Huck, who cannot endure the restrictions of his life in a town along the Mississippi River. He runs away and rafts down the river, along the way becoming friends with an escaped slave named Jim.

Some novels feature people who cannot break from their society’s conventions and instead become disillusioned with the conflict between their aspirations and the reality of their lives. American novelist John Updike explored this theme in Rabbit, Run (1960), about a former high school basketball star who is disappointed with his marriage, unsettled by the birth of his first child, and unhappy with his job as a used-car salesman.

Throughout the history of the novel, a major theme has been whether people can change their situations in life or whether they are in the grips of forces beyond their control. The literary school of naturalism, which emerged in the late 1800s in Europe and later spread to North America, explored the idea that people could not control their fates. Novelists such as Émil Zola of France and Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser of the United States were major figures in the naturalism movement. In his novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), American author John Steinbeck dramatizes a similar theme of loss of personal control by writing about the Joads, a family forced by economic changes to leave their land in Oklahoma to become migrant workers in California.

Other common themes in novels include how art and life are reflected in one another, the meaning of religion, and whether technology helps people or whether it is a harmful aspect of society.

IV.

Techniques of the Novel

There are several major techniques that novelists employ to make their novels rich in meaning and rewarding to the reader, including point of view, style, and symbolism. Novelists also use a number of minor devices such as imagery and irony.

The most important decision an author must make when writing a novel is what point of view to use. The point of view determines the limitations and freedoms that the author has in presenting the plot and theme to the reader. Readers will experience a book differently depending on whether they know everything that is occurring in the story and all the characters’ thoughts, or whether they have a more limited perspective, such as knowing only what one particular character knows.

A novelist’s style is the approach the writer takes in putting together words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Style can determine the pace at which the story is told and how directly the author relates the story to the reader.

Many novelists deepen the meaning of their stories by employing symbolism, the use of objects or ideas as symbols that represent other, more abstract concepts. With symbols, authors can write scenes that deepen the reader’s understanding of the theme of the novel. This occurs because the symbols have an unspoken meaning beyond their immediate presence in the story. Symbolism thus allows the author to address controversial matters, such as political or religious issues, without openly discussing these subjects.

Novelists also use many other literary devices, including imagery and irony. By using these devices, writers avoid the need to state every piece of information they wish to convey. Instead, the literary devices give readers the opportunity to discover themselves the layers of meaning in a novel.

A.

Point of View

The point of view of a literary work is the perspective from which the reader views the action and characters. The three major types of point of view in novels are omniscient (all-knowing narrator outside the story itself), first-person (observations of a character who narrates the story), and third-person-limited (outside narration focusing on one character’s observations).

A.1.

Omniscient Point of View

In a novel written from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, the reader knows what each character does and thinks. The reader maintains this knowledge as the plot moves from place to place or era to era. An omniscient narrator can also provide the reader with direct assessment of action, character, and environment. For example, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by American writer Carson McCullers opens with this description:

The omniscient narrator can assume a familiar tone with the reader, because the narrator is not bound by the scope of the story. Many of the earliest novels used the omniscient narrator in such a fashion. In Tom Jones (1749), English novelist Henry Fielding provides brief overviews at the beginning of each major section. Most simply set forth the time frame of the section (“Containing a portion of time somewhat longer than half a year”), but others give a more detailed overview:

The omniscient point of view has advantages and disadvantages. Using an omniscient narrator allows a writer to be extremely clear about plot developments. This point of view also exposes the reader to the actions and thoughts of many characters and deepens the reader’s understanding of the various aspects of the story. However, using an omniscient narrator can make a novel seem too authoritarian and artificial, because in their own lives people do not have this all-knowing power. If clumsily executed, providing thick detail may cause the reader to lose sight of the central plot within a mass of scenes, settings, and characters.

A.2.

First-Person Point of View

With the first-person point of view, one of the novel’s characters narrates the story. For example, a sentence in a novel in the first person might read, “As I waited on the corner, I remembered the last time I had seen her.”

The first person provides total subjectivity and all the immediacy, intimacy, and urgency of a single individual’s conflicts. The first person also shows a character’s awareness at telling a story. David Copperfield (1849-1850) by English novelist Charles Dickens is narrated by the title character and opens, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

The first person allows the author to write in the voice of a particular character. In his novel Huckleberry Finn (1884), which is narrated by the character Huck, American author Mark Twain not only wrote from Huck’s point of view, but he wrote in the voice that Huck would use if he were a real person. This approach gives Huck authenticity as a real character. Twain began chapter one of the book:

Some novelists use the first person in more complex ways. In The Sound and the Fury (1929), American novelist William Faulkner tells the story of the Compson family from four points of view, three of which are first person. The narrative begins from the point of view of a developmentally disabled man, Benjy. It then moves to the point of view of his intellectual brother, Quentin, and then to the point of view of another brother, Jason. The final section is told by an omniscient narrator.

The novel ¡Yo! (1997) by Dominican-born writer Julia Alvarez also uses a series of first-person narrators. The book is a portrait of a single character, Yolanda, told from the point of view of various people who know her from different stages of her life. Never does the reader hear from Yolanda directly, but by piecing together the observations of her friends and family, many of which are told in the first person, the reader gains a sense of Yolanda.

A.3.

Third-Person-Limited Point of View

The third-person-limited point of view tells the story from the third person (“he” or “she”), with a knowledge of what the main character thinks. For example, a sentence from a story in the third person limited might read, “As she waited on the corner, she remembered the last time she had seen him.”

Like the omniscient and first-person narrators, the third-person-limited narrator allows the reader access to the thoughts of the main character. Unlike the omniscient narrator, however, the third-person-limited narrator can only relay one character’s perspective to the reader. In this way the third-person-limited narrator is like the first-person narrator: The viewpoint recreates how an individual experiences the world.

American author Henry James employed the third-person-limited point of view to great effect in books such as Daisy Miller (1879) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), with the central character acting as a person who can evaluate the significance of events and in turn convey that evaluation to the reader. In Daisy Miller, the character Winterbourne serves this purpose. Early in the novel, Winterbourne relates his first impressions of Daisy:

When using a character as a voice of limited omniscience, the author may describe the character’s experiences only in terms that the character would use, or the author may take a more authoritative approach and describe the character’s life as an outside observer would. In Ulysses (1922), Irish novelist James Joyce uses the first approach when describing the character Gerty MacDowell. Gerty, a sentimental girl of limited understanding, expresses her narrow range of perceptions within her own limitations, and the reader sees the world very much through her eyes. By contrast, in the sections of Madame Bovary (1857) that Emma Bovary narrates, French novelist Gustave Flaubert adopts a broader perspective when he explains Emma’s thirst for romance, excitement, and grandeur in terms that Emma herself would not be able to express.

B.

Style

Style is the novelist’s choice of words and phrases, and how the novelist arranges these words and phrases in sentences and paragraphs. Style allows the author to shape how the reader experiences the work. For example, one writer may use simple words and straightforward sentences, while another may use difficult vocabulary and elaborate sentence structures. Even if the themes of both works are similar, the differences in the authors’ styles make the experiences of reading the two works distinct.

Style can be broken down into three types: simple, complex, and mid-style. Sometimes authors carry a single style throughout an entire work. Other times, the style may vary within a novel. For example, if the novelist tells a story through the eyes of several different characters, the use of different styles may give each character a distinctive voice.

A simple style uses common words and simple sentences, even if the situation described is complex. The effect of the simple style can be to present facts to the reader without appealing to the reader’s emotions directly. Instead, the writer relies on the facts themselves to affect the reader. American author Ernest Hemingway is widely known for a spare, economical style that nevertheless provokes an emotional reaction. His novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) opens with a simple yet powerful description:

A complex style uses long, elaborate sentences that contain many ideas and descriptions. The writer uses lyrical passages to create the desired mood in the reader, whether it be one of joy, sadness, confusion, or any other emotion. American author Henry James uses a complex style to great effect in novels such as The Wings of the Dove (1902):

A mid-style is a combination of the simple and complex styles. It can give a neutral tone to the book, or it can provide two different effects by contrast. American writer Carson McCullers uses the mid-style in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940):

Some authors use more than one style within a novel. This approach allows the author flexibility in choosing which style is appropriate at different points in the work, depending on the situation and on the character or characters being portrayed. Novelists who have mixed styles include Herman Melville of the United States, in Moby Dick (1851); James Joyce of Ireland, in Ulysses (1922); and Robert Penn Warren of the United States, in All the King’s Men (1946).

C.

Symbolism

Many novels have two layers of meaning. The first is in the literal plot, the second in a symbolic layer in which images and objects represent abstract ideas and feelings. Using symbols allows authors to express themselves indirectly on delicate or controversial matters.

Novelists have created symbolic patterns of imagery since the beginning of the genre. One famous example of symbolism is the letter A in The Scarlet Letter (1850) by American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the novel, the character Hester Prynne wears a scarlet-colored A on her dress to symbolize adultery, of which she was found guilty by judges in her community.

Another famous use of symbolism occurs in The Great Gatsby (1925), in which American author F. Scott Fitzgerald uses a green light at the end of a dock to symbolize the difficult-to-obtain American dream of success and happiness:

English novelist Joseph Conrad felt that the novelist must search for the “image,” meaning “the outward sign of inward feelings.” His short novel Heart of Darkness (1902) uses symbols extensively. The story is about a seaman, Marlow, who travels from England to Africa to work as a trader. While there he encounters another European, Kurtz, who has withdrawn from society and is living in a remote area up the Congo River. The following passage from the book suggests the jungle’s decay. Symbolically, Marlow’s voyage into the wilderness represents his spiritual exploration of his own soul:

Czech writer Franz Kafka used symbols in unexpected ways when he portrayed the legal battles of a man named Joseph K. in the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937). In the book the legal process represents not order and logic but confusion, because throughout the novel K. remains ignorant about its true workings.

Sometimes symbols have a straightforward meaning. American author Mary McCarthy used the term natural symbolism to refer to an author's use of images that require no elaborate interpretation. In Anna Karenina (1875-1877) by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, for example, the death of the nobleman Count Vronsky’s horse, which suffers an accident while racing, foreshadows the fate of the book’s heroine, Anna. William Faulkner used a straightforward symbol in his novella The Bear (1842), about a family’s traditional hunting trip. In this work the bear represents the idea of a noble, free animal in unspoiled wilderness.

Even when symbols appear to have a clear meaning in one part of a novel, they can have another meaning in another part of the book. One example is the prison in La chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma) by French author Stendhal. This jailhouse represents confinement, but that is not its only symbolic meaning. At one point the main character, Fabrizio, seems destined to be executed in prison, and yet it is only from prison that he can see his beloved Clelia (from the window of his cell). It is his occasional view of her from his enforced distance that makes their romance flourish, and because of this the prison is at this moment a place of hope. In Dombey and Son (1846-1848), Charles Dickens uses the image of a train to express two kinds of modern upheaval. In the early sections of the book, the train is connected with reordering and positive change in people's lives. Later the train becomes an instrument of destruction.

Symbols are not necessarily limited to one or two easy-to-identify meanings. For example, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Irish author James Joyce uses birds symbolically. One interpretation is that the birds represent the concept of escape, but this interpretation oversimplifies Joyce’s intentions. The symbol of the birds is also connected to the Greek mythological figure Icarus, who flew too close to the Sun wearing his artificial wings; the wings fall apart, and Icarus is plunged into the ocean. In addition, the birds are connected with the ideas of beauty, imagination, religion, and sexual desire.

Many novelists are wary of readers who search out symbols in works and try to identify their meanings. One symbol that has attracted a great deal of attention from readers is the white whale who gives his name to the title of the novel Moby Dick (1851), by American author Herman Melville. The book concerns Captain Ahab, a sailor obsessed with hunting down and killing Moby Dick, who, in a previous encounter, caused Ahab to lose one leg. Ahab and his ship, the Pequod, eventually track down Moby Dick, but the whale then destroys Ahab and his boat and escapes. English writer D. H. Lawrence once commented on the figure of the whale, “Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it.”

D.

Imagery and Irony

In addition to point of view, style, and symbolism, novelists use many other specific techniques in their works. Two of the most important are imagery, the collection of descriptive details that appeal to the senses and emotions of the reader by creating a sense of real experience, and irony, the reader’s recognition that what is expected from a statement, situation, or action is different from what actually happens.

Through imagery the writer attempts to embody in images all abstractions and generalizations about character and meaning. Japanese author Kawabata Yasunari is known for the startling images in his work. In Yukiguni (1948; Snow Country, 1956) the hero on the train sees a girl’s face reflected in the window as the mountain landscape flows by outside:

The difference between imagery and symbolism is that the purpose of imagery is not to embody meaning but to create an illusion of reality by stimulating the reader’s senses. Nevertheless, an image may also serve as a symbol when it has special meaning and represents another idea, either to the reader or to the novel’s characters. In The Scarlet Letter (1850) by American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, the letter A that Hester Prynne wears is an image in the novel that makes her character more vivid to the reader. Within the novel, in the town in which she lives, the letter symbolizes her adultery.

Irony can take several forms, and the novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by American writer Carson McCullers provides examples of each type. Irony can be dramatic (acting without knowing that the effect of one’s actions is the opposite of what one expected). In the novel, four different characters talk to John Singer, who cannot hear them or speak to them, because they think that he will understand their conflicts with other people. Irony can also be situational. When all four characters happen to visit Singer at the same time, each is ignorant of the fact that they have many problems in common and could perhaps help one another. And irony can be verbal (saying one thing when the opposite is true). Singer says to a friend of his who lives in a mental asylum, “I write to you because I think you will understand.”

Authors may also use irony to reveal something about characters to the reader without having the characters become aware of it themselves. In McCullers’s novel, only Singer and the reader are aware that Singer does not understand the characters when they speak to him.

Novelists use many other literary devices in their works. For more information on these devices, see Alliteration; Analogy; Figure of Speech; Humor; Parable; Parody; Satire; Stream of Consciousness.

V.

Genres of the Novel

Novels can be classified into dozens of genres, and novels may belong to several of these categories at the same time. Distinctions among genres can be drawn in many ways. Such distinctions include the form in which the works are written, such as epistolary novels, which take the form of letters written between characters; the settings, such as regional novels, which focus on life in a certain area; and the purpose, such as propaganda novels, which try to convince the reader to adopt a certain point of view. Other examples of distinct forms include picaresque novels, which describe the adventures of rogues; Gothic novels, which describe ghosts and other elements of the supernatural; science-fiction novels, which portray other worlds or other possibilities for our world; and detective stories, which focus on mysteries.

A few broad genres of the novel reflect some general tendencies. Social novels tend to focus on the outward behavior of characters and how other characters react. Psychological novels explore the inner workings of an individual’s mind. Education novels recount a person’s development as an individual. Philosophical novels provide a platform for authors to explore intellectual or philosophical questions. Popular novels usually involve adventure, intrigue, or mystery and appeal to a wide range of people. Experimental novels are works in which writers make major innovations in form and style.

A.

Social Novel

The social novel focuses on the behavior of characters and how the characters’ actions reflect or contradict the values of their society. The social novel includes two major types: the novel of manners and the chronicle novel. The novel of manners focuses on a small segment of society. The chronicle novel paints a broad survey of society as a whole. In both types, the characters’ external conflicts and interactions with others are the lifeblood of the story.

A.1.

Novel of Manners

In its general form, the novel of manners is concerned with subtle nuances of behavior and standards of correctness, usually in upper-class life. Novels of manners describe small encounters and use insights from these incidents to make generalizations that apply to humanity as a whole.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) by English writer Jane Austen describes bad behavior, ungentlemanly conduct, and the distinctions between the pride of self-respect and the various forms of arrogance, willfulness, and self-absorption into which this pride can be twisted. Austen’s novel focuses on the three Bennet sisters’ attempts to find husbands. The work features characters such as the reckless, man-chasing Lydia Bennet, the pompous Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the obsequious Mr. Collins, the snobbish Caroline Bingley, the cynical Mr. Bennet, the inane Mrs. Bennet, and the vulgar Mrs. Philips. Typical maneuverings are those of Caroline, a young woman who tries to impress Mr. Darcy by pretending to read a book he is reading. In the novel of manners, such moments, although seemingly trivial, expose the character of a person.

In her later novel Emma (1816), Austen also exposes questionable social maneuvers. For example, the pretentious Mrs. Elton's patronizing manner causes the main character, Emma, to fume, but Emma’s outburst reveals her own temper:

American authors Henry James and Edith Wharton wrote novels of manners to depict the struggle of people to maintain individualism while conforming to society’s expectations. In James’s novella Daisy Miller (1879), a young American woman in Europe unknowingly violates social norms by going to the wrong places, not being respectful to society ladies, and walking in public with men to whom she has not been properly introduced. Daisy’s too-friendly behavior and flirtatiousness scare off acquaintances, and James uses the small details of her infractions to comment on how difficult it can be for individuals to honor all of society’s conventions. Daisy herself even comments comically on her fate:

Wharton’s book The Age of Innocence (1920) develops much the same theme by showing how the so-called proper New York society of the 1870s, concerned with proper background and behavior, defeats the impulse for freedom and self-expression. Newland Archer has spent his life loving a beautiful, exotic cousin of his wife, but she does not fit his society’s idea of a proper wife. Although Newland is at peace with his place in society—he is described as “the good citizen”—he is aware of a lack in his life: “Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.”

The novel of manners can deal with any segment of society. A Handful of Dust (1934) by English author Evelyn Waugh is about the conflicting manners of Tony Last, a gullible, kindly country gentleman, and Brenda, his glamorous, faithless wife. The story exposes Brenda's reckless pursuit of an affair and Tony's self-absorption.

American novelist Mary McCarthy stays strictly within the bounds of the novel of manners in The Group (1963). This work uses the guiding idea of autonomy for women to show how several Vassar College graduates assert this autonomy in their love affairs, domestic arrangements, and careers.

Some novelists of manners have satiric intentions. In The Late George Apley (1937), American writer J. P. Marquand uses the letters of a member of Boston’s upper class to make fun of the type of man who imagines that his snobbish routines, club life, tastes, and connections form the most important part of American civilization. In Goodbye, Columbus (1959), American author Philip Roth satirizes the self-protective attitude of the prosperous middle class. Brenda Patimkin, daughter of a successful businessman, breaks off her relationship with her lower-middle-class boyfriend, Neil, by deliberately letting her parents know about their affair and by letting them forbid the relationship. Neil sums up Brenda's position by saying, “You can go home—your father will be waiting with two coats and a half-dozen dresses.”

A.2.

Chronicle Novel

The chronicle novel takes a broader view than the novel of manners by attempting to bring the scope of a whole civilization into the work. It also uncovers the meanings, principles, and social styles that govern people’s lives. The chronicle novel scrutinizes individuals but at the same time offers an analysis of social classes and groups.

Père Goriot (1834; Old Goriot) by French author Honoré de Balzac is a chronicle novel that uses the idea of fatherhood to explore facets of French society. The novel describes the mad generosity of old Goriot, a man who feels holy when he helps his daughters, who are women of low morals. Another father figure in the novel is the sly, sinister character Vautrin, who has a profitable murder scheme prepared for the benefit of his young friend Eugène de Rastignac. By describing Vautrin’s twisted paternal action toward Eugène, Balzac asserts that fatherhood is a failed principle in a society in which fashion and making money are of paramount importance.

Beyond this master idea, Père Goriot also explores the ambition of youth to throw off the past, including the influence of fathers. Eugène, a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris to discard the pieties and illusions of his old life, demonstrates this aspect of personal growth:

Eugène comes to recognize his place in society and how his situation can be a form of entrapment. This sort of recognition is typical of what characters discover in the chronicle novel. For example, in Little Dorrit (1857) by English author Charles Dickens, Arthur Clennam visits the deserted London streets on a Sunday, the drawing rooms of the upper middle class, the run-down neighborhood called Bleeding Heart Yard, and the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. In all these places he observes his fellow citizens in various forms of imprisonment: physical, emotional, and social.

The chronicle novel often has a historical sweep over several years or even generations. In Madame Bovary (1857), French author Gustave Flaubert first portrays Charles Bovary as a boy—the young oaf at school, his constrained and uneventful life with his parents. These images add depth to the later scenes that deal with the main character, his wife Emma, and her search for glamour.

Sartoris (1929) by American novelist William Faulkner follows tragic recklessness through several generations. The ideal of heroic daring begins for the family in the American Civil War (1861-1865) with the foolhardy actions of Bayard Sartoris, a Confederate Army officer who is killed in an ill-advised raid on a Union camp. This risk-taking heritage carries down to the 20th century, when the youngest surviving Sartoris leads a self-destructive life.

Another chronicle novel set in the American South is A Summons to Memphis (1986) by American author Peter Taylor. On one level the book is a story about a son’s view of his father, a man of traditional ideas. On another level it is a story about the social contrasts between two Tennessee cities, with Memphis representing the Old South and Nashville representing the New South. By looking at how a responsible, honest, but old-fashioned member of the old society is bewildered by the changes that have occurred around him, Taylor gives his impressions of modern life.

For Russian author Leo Tolstoy, public events and personal experiences both contribute to panoramic novels of Russian civilization. His Voina i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace) is a meticulous recreation of the period of Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), when French emperor Napoleon I waged war on much of the rest of Europe. Within this historical landscape, Tolstoy depicts individuals and their actions, in part because he views historical events as being caused by the convergence of innumerable individual actions. To represent why Russian civilization endured intact through the chaotic Napoleonic period, Tolstoy studies individual people and how they adjust to differing situations. For example, Natasha, who progresses from girlhood to middle age, symbolizes the natural process of adaptation and survival. Over the years she transforms herself from a vibrant, self-assured star of Saint Petersburg society to a family-oriented, settled matron.

À le recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931) by French author Marcel Proust examines an entire culture by focusing on an individual’s memories and impressions of society. The novel is not only an evocation of the customs and manners of an earlier period but also a recreation of the stages of consciousness of the narrator. The reader follows Marcel’s progress as he gradually penetrates the illusions of both social life and love. As he learns about snobbery and betrayal, he learns to rise above their destructive effects. In this seven-volume work, Proust documents the state of his society and shows that pretense and cruelty are highly developed in duchesses, courtesans, salon poseurs, and ladies’ room attendants alike.

B.

Psychological Novel

The psychological novel’s intent is to reveal its characters’ inner selves at a particular time in life. In terms of style, many psychological novels feature interior monologue and stream of consciousness; these are literary techniques that give the reader direct access to the inner thoughts of characters.

One famous example of a psychological novel is The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by American writer J. D. Salinger. The novel is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old boy who has just flunked out of his third prep school. Unwilling to remain at school until the end of the term, Holden runs away to New York City. He does not contact his parents, who live there, but instead drifts around the city for two days. Finally, drawn by the affection for his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe, Holden returns home. Although Holden tries to appear tough, his idealism is revealed when he tells Phoebe that he would like to be “the catcher in the rye”—the defender of childhood innocence—who would stand in a field of rye where thousands of children are playing and “catch anybody if they start to go over the cliff.”

A number of other American writers wrote powerful psychological novels in the mid-20th century. The novella Seize the Day (1956) by Saul Bellow follows the character Tommy Wilhelm, who has lost his job and is about to lose his wife. He seeks help from his father but is rebuffed, and then he watches as his investments fail and he goes bankrupt. By observing Tommy as his world falls apart around him, the reader gains an intimate sense of Tommy’s strengths and weaknesses.

A Separate Peace (1960) by John Knowles is about the relationship between Phineas and Gene, two boys who meet at prep school. Phineas is a charismatic athlete who gains widespread attention and respect. Gene is a more serious student who enjoys Phineas’s friendship but is jealous of his athletic abilities. The critical event in the novel is an accident that Phineas suffers, and by rendering Gene’s internal struggles over his role in the accident, Knowles depicts Gene’s character at that time in his life.

In The Bell Jar (1963), American writer Sylvia Plath examines the challenges of being a young woman in America in the 1950s by describing the precarious psychological condition of a character named Esther. A bell jar is a bell-shaped glass container. To show how she feels, Esther describes herself as being inside one. She is a strong scholar but unhappy with her life and the limitations her society places on women; she suffers a breakdown and attempts to commit suicide. However, she recovers and moves on with her life. This autobiographical novel roughly parallels events in Plath’s own life.

C.

Education Novel

The education novel describes stages in the life of its main character as the individual develops as a person. For example, in Great Expectations (1860-1861), English author Charles Dickens describes a boy named Pip as he grows up and the challenges he faces as he comes to terms with his own actions. The Mill on the Floss (1860) by English novelist George Eliot deals with a young girl and the consequences of her passions. Maggie Tulliver, although a character of intelligence and determination, is ultimately defeated by both the repressive society of her time and her own unwise impulses.

Le rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black) by French author Stendhal follows the maturation process of a young man named Julian Sorel. When he is accused of murder and brought into court, Julian refuses to make peace with the world around him. Instead, he simply does not bargain with a system that violates his personal integrity, and he is sentenced to death.

Defiance is also the motive of development in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by Irish writer James Joyce. As he grows up, the main character, Stephen Dedalus, finds that disobedience and betrayal—in Stephen's terms “silence, exile, cunning”—become ways for him to define himself. One of Joyce's favorite methods for representing the mind's discovery of the world was what he called epiphany—a “sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself.” In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen’s epiphanies take the form of unexpected perceptions in the course of daily life. For example, in the following passage he realizes the beauty of an ordinary girl:

Even before psychology developed as an academic field in the late 1800s, education novels explored people’s emotions and memories. For example, in the mid-1800s Charles Dickens used the monstrous looking, menacing convict Magwitch, in Great Expectations, as a haunting presence. Acting as a long-repressed image of childhood pain and degradation, Magwitch symbolizes forces that spring from nowhere and yet control an individual’s destiny. English author D. H. Lawrence also deals with the surfacing and resolution of old psychic problems in Sons and Lovers (1913). The main character, Paul Morel, comes to terms with his love for his father, Walter Morel, by becoming friends with the hardened workman Baxter Dawes, who shares many traits with Walter.

Education novels need not be limited to the early years of a character’s life. What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) by Canadian author Robertson Davies spans the entire life of a character named Francis Cornish, from childhood and education through a career in espionage and on to retirement, at which time Francis becomes an art collector. Davies became known for incorporating theories of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung in his work. One of the major Jungian ideas that Davies worked into his writings was that some experiences are shared on a subconscious level by all people.

Many education novels are concerned with an individual’s search for identity. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) by American author James Weldon Johnson, a man whose mother is black and whose father is white struggles with committing himself fully to black society or white society. In the end the man—who is never given a name—decides on white society, but only because American culture allows black people to be treated so badly. Forty years later another American writer, Ralph Ellison, described a young black man’s search for his place in the world in Invisible Man (1952). Ellison’s character, also unnamed, finally withdraws from a society that pushes black people to the margins.

D.

Philosophical Novel

Novelists have always found it relatively easy to include in their works theories and opinions about society, the universe, ethical values, and other ideas. Novels in which intellectual exploration is the main purpose are sometimes called philosophical novels. These works aim to confront the so-called eternal questions about freedom, humanity’s place in the universe, and the value of human effort.

In philosophical novels, characters are sometimes used to voice ideas and viewpoints, and they are as much spokespeople for theories and positions as they are independent figures. However, the philosophical novel differs from purely philosophical works because it embodies concepts in human personality and directs attention to the characters who hold opinions rather than just to the positions themselves.

Whereas most philosophical essays are concerned solely with ideas, the focal point for the philosophical novel is the consequence of ideas on ordinary lives. For example, Greek philosopher Plato and French writer Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote works that present ideas of how children should be raised, but English novelist Charles Dickens in Hard Times (1854) shows how theories about family life translate into everyday living. In this novel, a theory of education has tragic consequences for the theorist’s own children.

In Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927), German author Thomas Mann uses both debates and complex symbolism to convey ideas about modern civilization and the self-tormenting condition of people concerned with intellectual exploration. The book is set in a mountain hospital for sufferers of tuberculosis. Cut off from their ordinary lives, Mann's characters experience a pure and painfully keen sense of human consciousness, and they debate different views of human life. A good example of Mann’s use of symbolism is the X ray, which becomes an emblem for poetic insight and for Mann’s research into the nature of human life. Another symbolic motif, infection, yields a possible insight into the nature of existence. “Life itself?” Mann writes, “Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which we might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial?”

Debate and symbolism are also techniques used by Czech writer Franz Kafka in Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937), a philosophical novel about the challenges that face the individual in the modern world. Like Mann, Kafka chooses to filter issues through the life of an ordinary man. Joseph K., a conscientious bureaucrat, is awakened one morning by officials who tell him he is under arrest but who fail to specify his crime. K. searches for the solution to his situation by questioning those whom he considers witnesses and accomplices. But his encounters and debates with court officials, his lawyer, and others connected with the case only serve to help convict him of the unnamed crime. Kafka uses visual and symbolic images to convey the nightmarish aspect of K.’s trial. For example, in one scene, K. must locate the Court in the unlikely recesses of a tenement that is a maze filled with strangers who seem to know him. His wanderings symbolize that he is lost and does not know how to escape from his problems.

Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist influenced by Kafka, used philosophical novels to create a menacing political environment that prompts his characters to seek autonomy in play, sex, and art. In Nesnesnitelná lehkost bytí (first published in French, 1984; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984) he explores the pervasive effects of the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia after 1968, when troops from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies marched into Czechoslovakia to reinforce Communist rule. Using episodes from the lives of two couples, meditative digressions, dream scenes, and re-creations of historical events, Kundera explores the nature of human identity in a time of police investigations, forced confessions, and ideological ruthlessness masked as democracy.

For Kundera, the novel form is “a poetic meditation on existence.” Portraying a society that destroys individuality through police investigations and forced confessions, he shows what happens to characters who feel “weightless” because they lack traditional values and ideals of selfhood. He addresses the difficulty of maintaining standards of morality and judgment under a government that demands total submission from its citizens.

Like Kafka and Kundera, American writer Walker Percy offers a devastating account of the modern sense of confusion, but Percy does not ground his writings in politics. Percy’s novel The Moviegoer (1961) is about Binx Bolling, a stockbroker who finds escape from his unsatisfying life in the fantasy world of cinema. As Binx searches for the meaning of life, Percy uses the cinema as a complex symbol of the possibilities available in the modern world, as well as the limitations of modern society as a place to gain a lasting sense of meaning.

E.

Popular Novel

Popular novels are novels whose primary intention is to entertain. They are accessible to a wide range of people and are usually written to achieve commercial success by providing readers with a good story. There are many different types of popular novels, including Westerns, detective stories, spy novels, science-fiction tales, fantasy novels, horror novels, romances, and historical novels.

E.1.

Western Novel

Western novels are set in the American West and feature cowboys and Native Americans. These books feature cattle rustlers, stage and train robbers, and gunfights. One of the earliest Westerns was The Virginian (1902) by American novelist Owen Wister. It is about a Southerner who moves to the West. The Virginian, as the main character is known, is a calm but strong-willed hero who served as the model for many future literary characters:

Therefore Trampas spoke. “Your bet, you son-of-a—.”

The Virginian’s pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas:

“When you call me that, smile!” And he looked at Trampas across the table.

Many other American novelists produced classic Westerns. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) by Zane Grey tells the story of a gunslinger who helps a woman protect her property in Utah. The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) by Walter Van Tilburg Clark is about a search for cattle rustlers that ends in tragedy. In The Big Sky (1947) by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., a young man from Kentucky spends years in the Rocky Mountains in the mid-1800s. Shane (1949), a novel by Jack Schaefer, depicts a solitary gunfighter who is unable to escape violence once he arrives in a town.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some traditional Western novelists such as Louis L’Amour continued writing, but many of the works set in the American West dealt more with issues related to the environment and the ethnic diversity of the population. Major writers include Sherman Alexie, Rudolfo Anaya, Louise Erdrich, and Larry McMurtry.

See also Westerns.

E.2.

Detective Novel

Detective stories and mystery stories typically involve convoluted plots, so that the reader remains as puzzled as the characters within the story. Precursors to modern mysteries were the Gothic novels of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Gothic tales such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) by English writer Horace Walpole featured mysterious situations but were more concerned with creating a dark and frightening atmosphere than with solving a crime.

Detective stories and mystery tales emerged in the 1800s. A forerunner, Bleak House (1852-1853) by English novelist Charles Dickens, moves the reader from the East End of London to an aristocratic country house, connecting these two scenes through the unraveling of an illicit love affair in the past. Some of the best-known mystery novelists of the early and mid-20th century, along with examples of their work, are English author Agatha Christie (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926), Belgian French writer Georges Simenon (The Patience of Maigret, 1940), and American authors Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, 1930), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, 1939), and Ross MacDonald (The Galton Case, 1959).

Mystery novelists who came to prominence in the late 20th century include Americans Sue Grafton, who writes of the adventures of a private eye named Kinsey Millhone; Tony Hillerman, whose books feature Navajo police officers; Elmore Leonard, noted for fast-paced works set in seedy locations; and Walter Mosley, one of the most successful African American mystery writers.

See also Detective Story; Mystery Story.

E.3.

Spy Novel

Many popular novels take the form of spy stories. Some writers emphasize the glamorous side of a spy’s life, as English writer Ian Fleming did in several novels featuring the British secret agent James Bond. Bond lives in a world of fast cars, beautiful women, ingenious weaponry, and gorgeous settings. Fleming’s novels include Casino Royale (1953), Goldfinger (1959), and Thunderball (1961).

Other spy fiction looks at a darker side of life in espionage. The Secret Agent (1907) by English writer Joseph Conrad features agents who are seedy and petty. For example, the mission of Mr. Verloc, an operative for a foreign government, is the brutal and certainly antiheroic business of using a boy as an accomplice in blowing up the Greenwich Observatory in England.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) by British writer John le Carré features betrayal, misuse of power, and the cynicism of international intriguers. The main character is Alex Leamas, a middle-aged British agent who is assigned to protect the cover of a double agent in East Germany. To succeed in his mission, Leamas must allow himself and the woman he loves to be destroyed. Using the taut plot devices of the thriller, including a spectacular ending at the Berlin Wall, le Carré goes beyond action and excitement to explore the consequences of espionage for ordinary, decent people. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), le Carré describes the search for a traitor in the British intelligence community. The novel introduces false leads, scene shifts, and clues from different sources in the service of the complicated spy plot.

English writer Graham Greene also used the spy genre for unconventional purposes. His novel Our Man in Havana (1958) features parody and comic characters and situations. The mission is absurd: a mock intrigue involving a vacuum cleaner representative named James Wormold of Phastkleaners, Ltd. Recruited by British intelligence, he has no conception of what to do and so invents contacts and concocts reports.

See also Mystery Story.

E.4.

Science-Fiction Novel

Science-fiction novels are books based on actual or imagined scientific discoveries. Some common subjects for science fiction include space travel, time travel, the discovery of other intelligent beings in space, and the creation of self-aware robots. Frankenstein (1818) by English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is often cited as one of the precursors to science-fiction novels. It is the tale of a doctor who uses body parts to construct an artificial man.

In the late 1800s English author H. G. Wells was a great influence on science fiction, with novels such as The Time Machine (1895), about a man who travels forward in time; The Invisible Man (1897), about a man who turns himself invisible; and The War of the Worlds (1898), about a Martian invasion of Earth. For several decades in the early 20th century, the best science fiction was published in magazines, but in midcentury the genre revived in the novel form with authors such as Stanislaw Lem of Poland (Solaris, 1961; translated 1970) and Isaac Asimov (The Foundation Trilogy, 1951-1953), Frank Herbert (Dune, 1965), and Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969) of the United States.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, one movement in science-fiction novels was cyberpunk. The works of cyberpunk authors feature hardcore scientific technology and action-oriented plots. Major cyberpunk writers include Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, John Shirley, and Bruce Sterling. Other science-fiction novelists, the so-called humanist writers, focus their works on characterization and pay less attention to scientific developments. Important humanist authors include Orson Scott Card, Vonda McIntyre, and Ian Watson. Other influential science-fiction novelists include Brian Aldiss, Terry Brooks, Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Larry Niven, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

See also Science Fiction.

E.5.

Fantasy Novel

Fantasy novels deal with magical and supernatural characters and events. Many fantasy works are written in a lyrical or witty style, and some appeal especially to children.

Two of the most famous works of fantasy are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) by English author Lewis Carroll. These books are about a girl who finds herself in a strange world where she becomes larger and smaller, meets a talking rabbit, and has other dreamlike experiences. Another book about a girl who travels to a magical world is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by American writer L. Frank Baum. Baum’s novel is about a girl from Kansas named Dorothy, who together with her dog Toto is transported during a cyclone to the land of Oz.

English novelist J. R. R. Tolkien created an enduring body of work that includes the novel The Hobbit (1937) and the trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). These books are set in a fantasy world called Middle Earth. The Hobbit centers around the small and timid Bilbo Baggins who, lured into a treasure-hunting adventure, finds a ring that makes its wearer invisible. In The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo’s nephew Frodo gains possession of the ring and battles Sauron, a demonic being who desires control over all Middle Earth.

Another popular fantasy is Watership Down (1972) by British writer Richard Adams. The novel is about a group of rabbits who must find a new home. Beginning in 1998 English novelist J. K. Rowling began publishing the Harry Potter books. This series of fantasy novels about a boy in training to become a wizard became extremely popular among readers of all ages.

E.6.

Horror Novel

Horror novels, also called occult novels, usually deal with a battle between supernatural forces of good and forces of evil. They are typically darker than fantasy novels and aimed more at adult readers. An early example of a horror novel is Dracula (1897) by British writer Bram Stoker. This novel introduced the character of the vampire Count Dracula of Transylvania. A more contemporary example of a horror writer is American novelist Anne Rice, who became identified with fiction about vampires after the publication of her novels Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985). She followed with several more books about supernatural creatures. Other writers include William Blatty, author of The Exorcist (1971), about a girl possessed by a demon; and American writer Dean Koontz, who has published dozens of horror novels. One of Koontz’s most famous is Watchers (1987), which deals with genetic experimentation.

American novelist Stephen King is perhaps the best-known horror writer today. His first novel was Carrie (1973), about a lonely high school girl who can move objects with her mind. King’s many other novels cover a wide range of themes. His works include The Shining (1976), about a haunted hotel; Christine (1983), about a car that acts on its own; Misery (1987), about a writer kidnapped by a crazed fan; and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), about a girl who becomes lost in the woods in Maine.

E.7.

Romance Novel

Romance novels are stories of love. One of the first great romances was Jane Eyre (1847) by English novelist Charlotte Brontë, about a young orphan girl who gains a job as a governess and finds love with her employer. Rebecca (1938), by British writer Daphne du Maurier, tells of a young woman who marries a widower and becomes preoccupied with what kind of woman the man’s first wife was.

A classic romance is Love Story (1970) by Erich Segal, about a man from a wealthy family who marries a poor girl who dies young. A well-known passage from the novel describes one of their conversations:

“Stop!” She cut off my apology, then said very quietly, “Love means not ever having to say you’re sorry.”

Other famous romance novelists are Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, and Jacqueline Susann.

E.8.

Historical Novel

The historical novel places its characters in a past time. The novelist attempts to portray that era realistically in both fact and spirit.

The first major historical novel was Waverley (1814) by Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott. This novel and its many sequels revolve around historical events in Scotland, England, and many other regions of the world. French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote two major historical novels. Le comte de Monte-Cristo (1844; The Count of Monte Cristo) concerns a man unjustly imprisoned. Les trios mousquetaires (1844; The Three Musketeers) is about three swashbuckling adventurers during the reign of 17th-century French king Louis XIII.

One of the most popular novels ever in the United States is a historical novel. Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell is set during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Reconstruction period directly after the war. It tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara, a Southern belle who lives on her family’s plantation, Tara. Much of the novel concerns Scarlett’s infatuation with her neighbor Ashley Wilkes and the pursuit of Scarlett by a charming and dashing man named Rhett Butler.

Historical North America has been the subject of many other historical novels. In Northwest Passage (1937), American novelist Kenneth Roberts examines the life of 18th-century American frontiersman Robert Rogers. Rogers was one of the seekers of the elusive Northwest Passage, a water passage around the north coast of North America connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. World Enough and Time (1947) by American writer Robert Penn Warren revolves around political maneuverings in Kentucky in the early 1800s.

One of the most popular writers of historical novels of the late 20th century was Patrick O’Brian, who was born in England and later moved to Ireland. O’Brian wrote 20 books about Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, an Italian Catalan doctor and spy. O’Brian’s novels are set during the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), when French leader Napoleon I waged war on much of the rest of Europe. O’Brian published his first Aubrey-Maturin novel, Master and Commander, in 1969. The final installment of the series, Blue at the Mizzen, appeared in 1999, shortly before O’Brian’s death.

F.

Experimental Novel

An experimental novel can be defined as a work in which the author places great importance on innovations in style and technique. Experimental novels can be challenging to read because they represent reality in unusual ways, but they also demonstrate one of the novel’s greatest strengths—its ability to encompass an almost endless variety of approaches. Czech writer Milan Kundera asserted this idea when he argued that the novel is a constant questioning of forms.

One of the earliest examples of the novel of experimentation is Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) by English writer Laurence Sterne. The novel requires the reader to wait with the author until he finishes digressions, figuring out jokes and enjoying twists such as odd turns of phrase, puns, and blank pages. Twentieth-century Argentine writer Julio Cortázar termed a reader who must follow the author’s whims in this way an accomplice reader, because reading becomes a more involved activity. Cortázar allowed readers to become accomplice readers in his Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966), the structure of which permits readers to jump around from chapter to chapter.

During the 19th century the prevailing trend in the novel was realism, but some experimental efforts appeared. One example is Zapiski iz podpol’ia (1864; Notes from Underground) by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky plunges the reader into the narrator’s complex mindset. The term underground refers to the narrator’s inner psychology, which dominates the novel and allows the reader little objective perspective. This immersion of the reader in an individual’s thoughts was not a common literary approach at the time.

In À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931), French writer Marcel Proust explored the individual mind by attaching great importance to what he called “the little moment” of sharp, poignant sensory recall. These moments are triggered by the most ordinary everyday events—the uneven footing of a curbstone or, in the novel's most famous such moment, the taste of a madeleine (little cake) when dipped in tea, a taste that evokes for the narrator his childhood in the town of Combray.

Ulysses (1922) by Irish writer James Joyce is basically a projection of impressions, perceptions, and knowledge. Drawing attention to his chapters by changing the literary style he uses, Joyce constantly forces the reader to readjust to parody, stream of consciousness, dialogue in play form, mixing of objective fact and dream, journalese, and political bombast. The monologue of Molly Bloom at the end of the novel is the most famous example of how Joyce portrays the mind processing reality. In the monologue Molly moves quickly through a train of associations:

Even as he used stream of consciousness, Joyce did establish plots. Other writers abandon story line altogether. L’innomable (completed 1950; published 1953; The Unnamable, 1958) by Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett is a pure monologue detached from linked events. A voice tells versions of its situation in an indefinable environment, lost in a vast space, being forced to speak in order to exist, and being haunted by vague presences. The novel is an exploration of “the unintelligible terms of an incomprehensible damnation,” and the prose registers the voice’s confusion: “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.”

Other experimentalists retain some of the conventions of storytelling and are less inclined to move toward the outer frontiers of language and consciousness. In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), American writer Thomas Pynchon uses a complex plot and the trappings of social satire while at the same time achieving originality of form. The novel pokes fun at popular culture but on a deeper level explores the mentality of those convinced that broad conspiracies underlie much of what happens. The main character, Oedipa Maas, becomes a detective trying to uncover a network of subversives who are running a private postal service.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1983) by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez is also unified by the idea of a conspiracy, in this case a whole town’s casual attitude toward the impending murder of one of its inhabitants. The novel is experimental in that it is not a tale of identifying the killers—they have openly announced their intentions—but is instead a description of how and why the bystanders and participants handle their parts in the crime. The narrator, a reflective investigator who tries to re-create the crime through first-hand recollection and research, becomes a reporter of the townspeople’s indifference, resignation, callousness, and confusion.

La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1971) by Argentine writer Manuel Puig is another imaginative extension of the novel form. Part satire of 1940s movies and their audiences, part study of middle-class consciousness, the novel treats the theme of betrayal humorously. The structural core is a series of interior monologues. Film-crazed characters reveal their illusions and tastes, ideas of glamour, and views of love, seduction, and marriage. In one section the monologue is a one-sided conversation based on the observations of Choli, a woman in the cosmetics business who treats her friend Mita to comments on everything from eye shadow and men's silk dressing gowns to moral values. The reader serves as an accomplice in composing questions, or responses, omitted by the author. For example, in a remark that reveals both Choli's sensibility and the novel’s focus on illusions, Puig gives an answer to an unasked question:

Novels can employ archaic language and conventions, alternate histories, or modern technology to create new visions. A famous literary experiment is The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by American writer John Barth, in which Barth creates his own version of an 18th-century novel, complete with an imaginary diary by English colonizer John Smith. The main character, poet Ebenezer Cooke, “had found the sound of mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over.” Barth himself uses the style of the 1600s and 1700s to fashion an extended joke about the novel form itself and its preposterous plots, intrigues, and casts of eccentrics.

In Ragtime (1975) American author E. L. Doctorow mixes history and fiction to create events that never happened. For example, in the novel Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, two famous real-life psychoanalysts, take a trip through the Tunnel of Love ride at the Coney Island amusement park.

One of the best-known experimental novelists is American writer William S. Burroughs. His best-known book is Naked Lunch (1959), a loosely structured novel that depicts the experiences of a man trying to escape drug addiction. In the late 1960s Burroughs began experimenting with the technique of “cut-out and fold-in,” deliberately cutting apart and recombining the sentences of his manuscript in order to achieve new images and freedom from the boundaries of conventional storytelling techniques.

Technically, there is no end to the devices that novelists use to direct attention to their styles and structures. And there is virtually no end to the types of novels that writers create as they alter form, setting, and purpose to produce new and imaginative works that engage audiences.

VI.

History of the Novel

The earliest examples of long writings in prose appeared in Europe and Asia in ancient and medieval times, but the novel took its modern form beginning in the 1500s, primarily in Europe. Today authors from all parts of the world write novels. This section traces the historical development of the novel.

A.

Early Narrative Forms

Fictional stories were composed throughout the ancient world, and many of these have been referred to as novels. From ancient Rome the chief examples of these works are The Golden Ass (2nd century ad) by Lucius Apuleius, in which Lucius describes his adventures after magic ointment turns him into an ass, and the Satyricon (1st century ad) by Petronius Arbiter, which portrays wild parties and other excesses of