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A Brief History of English Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 2, 2020 • ( 0 )

To a greater extent than any other literary form, the novel is consistently and directly engaged with the society in which the writer lives and feels compelled to explain, extol, or criticize. The English novel, from its disparate origins to its development in the eighteenth century, from its rise in the nineteenth century to its present state, has been strongly influenced by the social, political, economic, scientific, and cultural histories of England. In fact, English writers dominated the novel genre in its earliest stages of development and continued to do so through much of its history. As a realistic form, the novel not only reflects but also helps define and focus society’s sense of itself, and as the novel reflects the growth of England first into a United Kingdom, then into an empire, and its decline to its present role in the Commonwealth of Nations, it does so predominantly through the eyes of the middle class.

Indeed, the origins and development of the English novel are most profitably examined in relation to the increasing growth and eventual dominance of the middle class in the course of several hundred years. Typically concerned with middle-class characters in a world largely of their making, the novel sometimes features excursions into the upper reaches of English society; with more frequency, it presents incursions by members of the upper class into the familiar world of the solid middle class. As a form of realistic literature intended primarily for the middle class, often for their instruction and edification (or excoriation), the novel frequently depicts the worlds of the lower orders of society—not only the exotic cultures subjugated by Imperial Britain but also the familiarly strange domestic worlds of the “criminal classes,” a subculture with its own hierarchies, vocabulary, customs, and occupations.

As distinguished from allegory and romance, the English novel has for its primary focus the individual situated in society and his or her emotions, thoughts, actions, choices, and relationships to others in complex and often bewildering environments. Set against backgrounds that realistically reflect all facets of the English experience, the “histories” or “lives” of the novels’ protagonists must hold a necessary interest for readers who, in turn, seek to make sense of, master, cope with, escape from, or become fully assimilated into the society in which they, like their heroes and heroines, find themselves. While any attempt to trace with great particularity the multiple relationships between the history of the English novel and the larger patterns of English society remains necessarily imperfect, the general outlines of those relationships can be sketched.

Origins of the English Novel

Although long-standing debates about the origin of the English novel and the first English novel continue, it is both convenient and just to state that it is with the fiction of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) that the first novel appeared, especially in the sense that term came to have in the late eighteenth century and continues to have today. Without considerable injustice it may be said that the novel first developed out of a series of false starts in the seventeenth century and a series of accidents in the eighteenth. The reading public, having been exposed to large amounts of novelistic material, fictions of various lengths, epics, and prose romances, appears to have been ready to receive a form that went beyond Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave (1688), John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), and the prose works of earlier masters such as Sir Thomas Malory, John Mandeville, Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Nashe. Such a form would emphasize unified action of some plausibility, individualized and articulate characters, and stories presented with such verisimilitude that the readers could find in them highly wrought illusions of the realities they knew best.

The literary children of the eighteenth century, the novel and its sibling the short story, created a taste for fiction of all varieties in a middle-class readership whose ranks were swollen by a newly literate mercantile class. This readership appears to have wanted and certainly received a literary medium of their own, filled with practically minded characters who spoke the same middle class English language and prized the same middle-class English goals (financial and familial success) as they themselves did. In general, the novel helped make the position of the individual in new, expanding, and increasingly urban social contexts more intelligible; frequently addressed directly to the “dear reader,” the novel presented unified visions of individuals in society, reflected the cultural and social conditions of that society, and supported the presumed rationalist psychology endemic to the age, which was fostered by Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.

The novel was influenced by historic events and societal developments, especially tidal changes that involved the class structure of English society. The merchant class had existed for centuries and had steadily grown in the Age of Discovery and during colonization in the seventeenth century. In that century, a number of events conspired to begin the disestablishment of the feudal, medieval world, a disestablishment that would become final in the early nineteenth century. The beginning of the English Civil War (1642) marked the most noteworthy outbreak of religious and class strife England had yet seen. The subsequent regicide of Charles I in 1649 and the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords by the House of Commons in that year signaled the formation of the Puritan Commonwealth (1649- 1660) and the first rise to political dominance of the middle class, a much-contested context. In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Parliament invited William of Orange and his wife, Mary, the Protestant daughter of the Catholic James II, to rule England. James II (the “Old Pretender”) fled to France with his son Charles (the “Young Pretender” or Bonnie Prince Charlie), established himself in exile, and began plotting a return to power that would eventuate in the Scottish rebellions of 1715, 1719, and 1745-1746 on behalf of the Stuart monarchy. The Glorious Revolution may, in part, be seen as establishing the principle that the English middle class, through Parliament, could choose their own ruler; it may also be seen as another phase in the growth of power of that middle class.

A war with France (1689-1697) saw the beginning of the national debt, but the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (especially during the reign of Queen Anne, 1702-1714) were marked by material progress, increased mercantilism, drastically increased population, and a rapid and irreversible shift of population from the country to the city. Apart from two major trade monopolies (the Hudson Bay Company in Canada and the East India Company in the Indian subcontinent), trade was open to all after 1689. Free enterprise flourished and with it the middle class, as early eighteenth century England became a mercantile society teetering on the brink of the Industrial Revolution and the concurrent scientific revolution that abetted it. While the governance of England still rested with a relatively small number of families, the hereditary landowners of England had to share power with the new merchant princes of the era.

From this milieu of class conflict emerged the earliest English novels. Rooted both in the picaresque tradition stemming from the anonymous Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes (1554; English translation, 1576) and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) and in the pseudohistorical tradition, Daniel Defoe’s novels present their fictions as fact, as the “histories” or “lives” of characters such as Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Newport, and Moll Flanders. Defoe’s novels are distinguished by a realism that employs minute and concerted observations, as well as a morality that—despite lapses, an occasional blind eye to folly, and some ambiguous presentations of vice—fits well with the morality of the middle class, especially when erstwhile sinners repent and exemplify the Protestant virtues of seriousness, usefulness, social responsibility, and thrift. Like their many literary descendants, Defoe’s characters evince a cheerful triumph of person over place and situation, an eventual mastery of the world and its too-familiar snares in the common and the uncommon adventures that form their educative encounters with the world and with themselves.

Even more obviously in line with middle-class Puritan ethics is the work of Samuel Richardson (1689- 1761), whose epistolary novels of personality, sensibility, and moral conflict present the first multidimensional characters in English prose fiction. Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741) began by accident what Walter Allen calls the “first great flowering of the English novel.” Commissioned to compose and print Familiar Letters as models of correspondence, moral guides, and repositories of advice to “handsome girls,” Richardson expanded the project until it became Pamela. The particular virtue rewarded is chastity, in the face of assaults from a member of the Squirearchy, Mr. B., who is, ironically, a justice of the peace. One important artistic concern in the novel is the power of the written word to effect the conversion of wayward characters. One could take the view that Pamela’s epistles reinforce traditionally Christian, or social, or merely prudential morality and that they also represent the generally desirable triumph of a member of the lower-middle class over representatives of the upper-middle class and the titled upper class. Virtue is, Richardson suggests, its own reward; it is all the better if it brings other rewards prized by the middle class. The novel’s themes of moral courage and virtue reaffirmed bourgeois values and thus helped create an avid reading public.

Following Defoe, whose fiction offered a journalistic facticity, and Richardson, who wrote transparent moral sermons, Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was the first to write avowed novels and depict ordinary English life and the panorama of his age. Like Richardson, Fielding’s beginning as a novelist was fortuitous. Sir Robert Walpole served George I and George II as prime minister from 1721 to 1742, and for much of that time he was the object of satire at the hands of several playwrights, Fielding among them. With Walpole’s successful introduction of the Licensing Act of 1737, Fielding’s career as a dramatist ended, and he turned his ironic and satiric vision to the new prose form, the novel, perfecting that form, many argue, in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Before that accomplishment, however, Fielding began his prose efforts by writing a broad satire of Richardson’s title character, Pamela Andrews, which he titled An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741). He followed this success with The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742), concerning Pamela’s imagined brother, but took the story in new directions at midnovel. His Amelia (1751) is the first novel of social reform and thus was a point of reference for Charles Dickens and the many contributors to the “Newgate novel” in the nineteenth century. In Amelia, Fielding clearly exposes social wrongs and provides possible remedies for them. His portrayal of gambling dens, prison life, and the omnipresent Hogarthian gin mills foreshadows the excessive realism (or naturalism) of Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola in France and George Moore in late Victorian England.

Two other great eighteenth century novelists, Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), added various dimensions of eighteenth century English life to the novel’s inventory. In The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), Smollett brought to the novel the first extended account of one fundament of English trade, prosperity, and adventure: seafaring life. Like Fielding and Defoe, he used English military history as background material for some of the finest English picaresque novels. Sterne, in Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), departed from the norm that his contemporaries had established, introducing a stream-of-consciousness technique to refract society through the prism of an individual mind, a technique that would not be further developed until the early twentieth century in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

The Gothic Novel

By the end of the eighteenth century, both the novel of sentiment and the gothic novel had appeared in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith (1728 or 1730-1774) and The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole (1717-1797). While Goldsmith’s work and others like it continue in prose the situations and characteristics of the highly popular sentimental domestic drama of middle-class life, Walpole’s novel exists outside of the conventions of eighteenth century thought and fiction. His is the only novel of those already mentioned that does not take as its premise the world as it exists, society in the country or city, and the generally agreed upon concept of the possible as coextensive with the real. Premised, then, on questions of epistemology and radical uncertainty, one can ascribe to The Castle of Otranto the beginnings of gothic traditions in the novel.

An emphasis on shared, common experience and consensus unified society and its conception of itself intellectually, philosophically, and psychologically. This society, in many respects the first truly modern society, emerged near the end of the seventeenth century into the era of Enlightenment and took for its tenets common sense, secular reason, science, and gentility. One fundamental emphasis of this era was upon the necessity to treat life and its problems in the spirit of reason and scientific empiricism rather than in the traditional spirit of appeal to authority and dogma. In this era, the landed gentry and not a few of the merchant princes regarded themselves as “Augustans” and sought to imitate the values and beliefs of the Roman patricians of the age of Augustus. In so doing, they set the intellectual tone of their times by asserting rationalism (and skepticism) as the primary focus of thought and by insisting on symmetry in all phases of life as well as of art, artificial ornament and the preference of artifice to “nature,” reserved dignity in preference to any form of enthusiasm, and expansive, urbane sophistication instead of narrow, superstitious thought. It comes, then, as an extraordinary incongruity to find not only Walpole’s work but also other novels of horror written, avidly read, and widely praised in this neoclassical Age of Reason.

Nevertheless, Walpole’s gothic story was immensely successful, quite probably so in reaction to the restraint of the age, the dominion exercised by the Protestant ethic, and the evangelicalism of the century born in the advent of Wesleyanism and Methodism. In his conscious outlandishness, Walpole set a new course for fiction. His horrific pseudomedieval tale was followed by the gothic novels of Clara Reeve (1729-1807), Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)—especially The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)—and Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775- 1818), and by numerous novels of the Romantic period. The success of this kind of imaginative, experimental writing is most probably what allowed for later development of novels based on fantasy, including science fantasy and science fiction. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) continued the gothic strain in the nineteenth century and became the preeminent novel of experimental science.

The Late Eighteenth Century

The last quarter of the eighteenth century, a period that saw the beginnings of Romanticism, featured the remarkable first ministry of William Pitt, the Younger (1759-1806), a ministry that laid the foundation for much of the reform movement in the nineteenth century. The intellectual tenets of the Augustan Age, already called into question by the gothic novelists and several poets of the age, were about to suffer a sea change in the triumph of individualism that characterized Romanticism. Economically, however, England maintained rather than altered its newfound tradition of progress, legitimatized by the writings of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. The advances of industry and capitalism begun early in the Augustan Age continued and ensured an economic boom that, with few setbacks, was to characterize the nineteenth century and fuel the expansion of the empire. Culturally, the pre-Romantic period was marked by an extraordinary growth in literacy, helped in great part by the growth of charity schools, the drive to regularize and teach English (if only for commercial purposes), the increasing new opportunities for the education of women, and the establishment and development of circulating libraries.

Two writers of this transitional period—the era, roughly speaking, between the outbreak of unrest in the American colonies in the early 1770’s and the accession of Queen Victoria (1837)—stand apart from the mainstream of the rapidly changing world in which they lived. One, Jane Austen (1775-1817), epitomized an age that had already passed; the other, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), eschewed his own world except to the extent that he could translate some of its characteristics to other times. Austen’s works, unpublished until the second decade of the nineteenth century, are the last novels of the Enlightenment. Unlike those of the other great eighteenth century novels, the characters presented by “the great feminine Augustan” are drawn almost exclusively from the landed gentry. In her novels she presents minute descriptions of the members of that class, their characters, beliefs, aspirations, and hopes in a period marked by a strong desire for stability on the part of the gentry despite the fact that they were surrounded by the armies of change. A supremely accomplished novelist, Jane Austen set the pattern for all subsequent novels of manners and family. Her characters interest themselves in issues of importance only to themselves—social position, socially and financially advantageous marriages, and the orderly passage of property from one generation to the next. The portraits that emerge are absolutely dissimilar to those of Fielding and his fellows and are essentially those of the placid, insulated upper class; as such, they present not only highly wrought pictures of the gen try but also invaluable insights into a social stratum that utterly vanished in the twentieth century.

Scott’s Romantic novels, unlike Austen’s works, deal with the world as it might have been rather than as it then was. His novels transplant nineteenth century heroes of sense, sensibility, and virtue to remote places or historically distant times. Moreover, his pioneer work in shaping the historical consciousness and national identity of Scotland while recounting its seventeenth century and eighteenth century history, and his novels of medieval and Renaissance Britain won him a place as a universally respected novelist of his century.

Both Austen and Scott are anomalies. Austen clearly summarizes the Augustan Age and its concerns, and Scott is surely the spokesman of a movement that grew in the last decades of the eighteenth century and took hold as the dominant intellectual mode of subsequent centuries, Romanticism. Though his novels rarely treat the world in which he lived, Scott’s perceptions were conditioned by the growing intellectual and emotional tenets of Romanticism. Although he sought to explore the political and social conditions of earlier times in English and Scottish history, he consistently chose not to recognize the inescapable facts of the Industrial Revolution, the expensive (both in money and in lives) wars England waged in his own time, and the bloodless social revolution that saw the gentry finally replaced by the middle class as the political and economic rulers of England. The largest element of Scott’s Romanticism is a studied medievalism that may be viewed as an escapist alternative (of considerable psychological necessity) to the pervasive and turbulent revolutions in every sector of society and as a reassertion of fundamental and traditional values. One benefit Scott gained by focusing upon Romantic medievalism as his chief fictional concern is that he thereby escaped the social censure and ostracism other Romantics experienced. Not only did he achieve personal respectability as a poet-turned-novelist, but he also created such a large and insatiable reading public for his and others’ novels that the novel became the most popular form of literature.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian novelists—Charles Dickens was arguably the greatest of them—mark a new era in the novel, an era in which the primary middle-class emphasis on its own place in society and the reformation of society in its own image came to the fore. Society itself expanded in the Victorian Age to include not only England and the United Kingdom but also an empire upon which, proverbially, the sun never set. In consequence, novelists, in their characters, backgrounds, and plots, often surveyed an empire that extended geographically to all continents, covering fully one-tenth of the earth’s surface, and financially to the entire populated world. Trade and tradesmen literally moved the empire, opened Australia and Canada to colonization, brought India into the fold (first via the East India Company and then, in 1857, under the Crown), and brought about the foundation of the corporate world with the Companies’ Act of 1862.

The reform movement, in part attributable to the Romantic rebellion and in larger part to the middle-class redefinition of societal ideals, came to partial fruition in the 1820’s and flourished in the 1830’s and in subsequent decades. The hated and inflationary measure of 1815 prohibiting grain imports, the Corn Law, was modified in 1828; the Combination Acts of the era illustrate the pronounced middle-class opposition to trade unionism; the repeal of the Test Act (1828) and the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill (1829) brought about a liberalization of attitudes toward Roman Catholics and extended political franchise to a large number of men; the Third Reform Bill (1832) abolished slavery in the empire; the Factory Act (1833) regulated working hours and required two hours of schooling daily for children under the age of thirteen; and the New Poor Law (1834) represented another phase of regularizing governmental services and social programs. These reforms typify, without nearly exhausting, the great social legislation of this era. Reform was the byword of the early decades of the nineteenth century and the hallmark of the entire Victorian era as English society evolved. Subsequent reforms in suffrage, for example, seem to have moved at a glacial pace and only included women in 1928, but each new enfranchisement under the ministerial guidance of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone added appreciably to the power of the middle class. It was quite natural, then, for the English novel to add social reform to its repertoire of themes.

Conditions for novelists also improved in nineteenth century England. As the eighteenth century marked the end of patronage as the primary support of artists and writers, so the explosion of periodicals, the multiplication of newspapers, the growth of publishing firms, and the extension of consumerism to literary works in the nineteenth century made it possible for more writers to try to live by and from the pen. “Grub Street” had meant, since the mid-eighteenth century, hard times for writers such as Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, and in the eighteenth century the supply of writers far exceeded the demand. This, too, was the case in the nineteenth century, but less severely so, and it would remain the case despite the paperback, magazine, and other media revolutions of the twentieth century. It has often been suggested that Dickens,William Makepeace Thackeray, and most popular novelists of the century whose novels were first serialized in journals and magazines wrote at such length because they were paid by the line of print; while padding is one possible consequence of such a method of publication and payment, the leisurely pace of the novel, its descriptiveness and its length, date from the eighteenth century and grew without regard to such payment schedules. Serial publication no doubt influenced how authors arranged their plot developments. Authors provided rising action toward the end of each installment rather than solely toward the end of the entire novel. These suspenseful moments became known as “cliffhangers” for their ability to tease readers into purchasing the next issue.

The Victorian novel as exemplified in the works of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) not only describes life but competes with it as well. Here one finds a verisimilitude so persuasive that the swarming complexities of Victorian life seem fixed in the novels. While carrying on the traditional celebration of middle-class values, Dickens also tried to make sense of the complex variety of choices open to his readers, of the fabric of society (by explaining, exposing, and mythologizing the middle class), of the ills of his society (by exposing them and calling for their reform), and of the patent injustices of capitalist society (by emphasizing their consequences, the plight of the victims of injustice, and the dehumanization of its perpetrators). To all of these concerns Dickens added a sense of comedy that suffused his early and some of his middle work but that changed to ferocity in his last complete novel, arguably his best after Bleak House (1852-1853, serial; 1853, book), Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865, serial; 1865, book).

Like Scott and many of his own contemporaries, Dickens is not above providing in his fiction a psychological escape from the mechanized world of his readers, as in Pickwick Papers (1836-1837, serial; 1837, book), a genteel picaresque work set in the period before the Age of Steam. Little else but artificially contrived escape exists for the reader and the protagonist of Oliver Twist (1837-1839, serial; 1838, book), an intense (and in its initial chapters unrelieved) examination of the workhouse system, one of the more depressing phenomena of the reform movement. Similarly, his descriptions of the criminal classes (so severely criticized, especially in regard to his depiction of prostitutes and child criminals, that he felt compelled to document his observations in the preface to the novel’s second edition) illustrate the predatory relationship of this class to all other classes and form an indictment of the society that spawned and neglected them, an indictment that Dickens reiterated in Bleak House and elsewhere. Dickens the social reformer achieves some of his most enduring effects by indulging in the sentimentalism inherent in the sort of melodrama popular in the Victorian Age and still popular in some sectors today.

The Chancery Court and the legal system are the objects of Dickens’s satiric wrath in Bleak House, a novel that amply illustrates that “the Law is a Ass,” while in few other novels has the middle-class Gospel of Wealth been so soundly condemned as in Dombey and Son (1846-1848, serial; 1848, book). It is significant that in this novel the railway appears for the first time in Dickens’s works. Dickens cast a cold eye on another English social institution, debtors’ prison, in Little Dorrit (1855-1857, serial; 1857, book), in which London’s Marshalsea Prison is the primary setting. On a smaller canvas in Hard Times (1854), he took on the educational abuses favored by the Gradgrinds of British industrial Coketowns, complete with their belief in the dullest of “facts.”

Similar social issues and notions of reform appear in the Newgate novels (picaresque tales of crime and punishment by incarceration in Newgate Prison) and in the important work of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810- 1865). Both Gaskell and Charles Kingsley ( Alton Locke , 1850) did much to introduce the working-class or proletarian figure as a central focus of fiction, a focus Thomas Hardy would further sharpen late in the century.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), a contemporary and sometime friend of Dickens, presented the world of the upper-middle class and limited his novels to that sphere. His Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (1847-1848) eschewed the conventional novel of intrigue and focused on the steady social climb of Becky Sharp from the position of governess to the ranks of the leisured gentry, a new class only possible to the England of empire and Industrial Revolution. Thackeray is at pains to glorify the virtues of the upper-middle class and to bolster them through his fiction: Marriage, home, and children constitute the proper society he portrays. Surely it is still possible to see in these ideals the safe harbors they had become for Victorians: It is also possible to view them as indicative of the societal dichotomy present in nearly every aspect of Victorian thought, a dichotomy that, in this case, emphasized an intense desire for security while positing the need for the adventurous life of acquisition. Like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Thackeray turned his hand to the historical novel to explore from a nineteenth century perspective the social and literary life of the Queen Anne era, the Jacobite plots to return the Stuarts to monarchy, and the campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough.

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) brought to the novel two new subject areas drawn from Victorian life: In his Barsetshire novels he introduced the first accurate portraits of English clerics; in his political or parliamentary novels he presented accurate descriptions of English politicians and political life rivaled only by those of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), the first earl of Beaconsfield and twice prime minister of England (1867- 1868; 1874-1880). In the novels of Trollope and Disraeli the vast and intricate world of ministries and parliaments, political intrigue, and the multifarious activities of empire in relation to the political process achieve a place in the novelistic tradition of England.

The religious controversies of the era, notably the Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholicism it induced, are present as background to Trollope’s Barsetshire novels. The controversies are the concerns of several characters in the works of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880), and enter into Sartor Resartus (1833- 1834, serial; 1836, book) by Thomas Carlyle (1795- 1881) as well as into numerous other novels of the era, many of which use the historical convention of setting stories in Roman times to explore the religious question. Eliot’s explorations of the internal motivations of her characters, in Middlemarch (1871-1872), for example, led to a brand of novel sometimes described as “psychological,” although the full manifestation of this inside story would be independently delivered by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and James Joyce (1882-1941) after the turn of the century. The scientific basis for certain religious controversies, such as the influx of German higher criticism, the use of evidence from the expanding science of geology, and the introduction of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), also find their way into the novels of the period. The religious question and its attendant fideist, agnostic, and atheistic responses find novelistic expression in the works of such writers as Trollope; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), the exponent of “Muscular Christianity”; Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), especially in Father and Son (1907); and Samuel Butler (1835-1902), particularly in Erewhon (1872), Erewhon Revisited (1901), The Fair Haven (1873), and The Way of All Flesh (1903).

Both abrupt and gradual changes in the religious climate are reflected in many Victorian novels, particularly in the otherwise quite dissimilar works of George Meredith (1829-1909) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Meredith’s championing of “advanced ideas” generally and his particular advocacy of woman suffrage, free thought, political radicalism, and evolutionary theory (optimistically considered) combine to form a vision of the Comic Spirit that suffuses his works. Hardy was differently affected by the multiplicity of Victorian controversies and conflicting claims; in his works one finds not comedy but a tragic vision of human life dominated by an inexorable sense that the evolutionary process has produced in man a kind of alien species against which the permanent forces of nature are constantly arrayed. Nowhere is this more evident than in Jude the Obscure (1895), a novel so universally condemned by churchmen and the conservative literary establishment that Hardy turned away from the novel to become a poet of considerable importance.

Another element in the continuing debate that the Victorians carried on with themselves springs from the social reform movements of the era and collides with the positivistic thought of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who coined the term “sociology.” This element surfaced in some of Dickens’s work ( Bleak House; Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843-1844 [serial], 1844 [book]; Our Mutual Friend; and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870), rose to a different plane in the novels of Wilkie Collins ( The Woman in White, 1860; The Moonstone, 1868), and formed much of the matter of “yellowback” or pulp novels as “shilling shockers” and “penny dreadfuls.” It reached its logical Victorian zenith in the accounts of the world’s greatest private consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), narratives that range from A Study in Scarlet (1887) to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

The Detective and Spy Novels

The phenomenon of detective fiction captured the interest and imagination of the Victorian public at all levels of society. Organized police forces were first created in the nineteenth century, the science of criminology was born, and ingenious threats to life and, especially, property from the criminal classes grew apace with the unremitting urbanization of England. The steady progress of the fictional criminal, from the endearing rogues of sentimental fiction to the personification of social evil created by Conan Doyle in his Napoleon of Crime, Professor Moriarty, is directly related to the growth of the propertied middle class, to the swelling population of the “undeserving poor” (in George Bernard Shaw’s phrase), to the ample opportunities for anonymity which urban centers and clear class divisions afforded, to the inevitable lure of easy money, and to the multiple examples of corrupt politicians on a national scale. Crime fiction kept pace with developments in crime and in criminal investigation, and in some cases the fiction anticipated developments in criminal science. The crime thriller, mystery story, and detective novel are still staple items of English fiction and have been so for more than a century, thanks to the efforts of Conan Doyle and the prodigious work of such writers as Agatha Christie (1890-1976) and John Creasey (1908-1973).

Still another subgenre linked to the detective novel was born of the armies of empire, international political events, and the information and communication explosions of the nineteenth century—the spy novel. Espionage had run through several Romantic and Victorian novels, but the Secret Service—John le Carré’s “Circus” in his novels of the 1960’s and 1970’s—first came to prominence in Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling (1865- 1936), and revolutionary espionage and anarchy came to the fore in The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). The spy novel in the twentieth century had great impetus from the events of World War I and World War II (in The Third Man: An Entertainment, 1950, for example, by Graham Greene) but is most closely associated with the post-1945 Cold War.

Both the detective novel of the Victorian Age and the spy novel born in its last days came to emphasize, of necessity, plot and action over character development and so tended to evolve into forms that do not fully coincide with the mainstream novel as the Victorians established it for themselves and their successors. A primary example of this is Ian Fleming’s (1908-1964) character James Bond; a notable exception is John le Carré’s (born 1931) George Smiley: Both writers and their characters face each other across an abyss. Yet the impulse to both sorts of fiction is historically rooted in the Romantic fiction of Scott and in the Romantic revival of the late nineteenth century, a revival sparked by an ever more urgent necessity to seek in fiction an escape from the complexities and difficulties of the present, and to find in fiction the disordered world set right, a finer or more exotic world, an adventurous world providing a chivalrous alternative to and a definite release from mercantile and corporate life.

In the Romantic revival of the late Victorian era, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) provided the best and most enduring fictional alternatives to the everyday life of Edinburgh, London, and the great industrial cities of the United Kingdom. Stevenson’s novels of Scotland ( Kidnapped , 1886; The Master of Ballantrae, 1889; David Balfour , 1893; Weir of Hermiston, 1896), Treasure Island (1881-1882), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) set a new fashion for tales of adventure and terror with such prime ingredients as soldiers, rebellions, pirates, and a monstrous transmogrification. His example was followed by H. Rider Haggard (1856- 1925) in King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Anthony Hope (1863-1933) in The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), Bram Stoker (1847-1912) in Dracula (1897), and P. C. Wren (1885-1941) in Beau Geste (1924), and by the writers of “best sellers” in succeeding generations. The novels of Alistair MacLean (1922-1987), Frederick Forsyth (born 1938), Jack Higgins (Harry Patterson, born 1929), and the hundreds of novels about World War II continue the Scott-Stevenson tradition, mixing reality with escapism. Further other-world fiction was provided by authors such as H. G. Wells (1866-1946) who, in science fantasies such as The Time Machine: An Invention (1895) offered readers hypothetical realities in novels that were sometimes classified as “speculative fiction.”

The Twentieth Century Novel and Beyond

The end of Queen Victoria’s reign and the accession of Edward VII (1901) truly marked the end of an age and of a century in which the novel rose to literary supremacy. On the eve of the twentieth century, England had passed several relatively peaceful decades since the Napoleonic era. The military excursions of the Crimean War (1854-1856), the Sepoy Rebellion in India (1857), a war with China (1857-1858), and the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902) in no way prepared the empire for the global struggle that began in 1914 in the reign of George V and lasted as the Great War (now, World War I), until 1918. This and other military conflicts of the twentieth century left clearly discernible marks upon the development of the English novel. World War II (1939-1945), the most cataclysmic for England, is also the most notable of the conflicts but not the longest. Wars, “police actions,” and skirmishes in the distant corners of the empire, from Suez (1956) or Palestine (1949) to the Falkland Islands (1982), and extending temporally from the Boer War to the Argentinian conflict, may have matched in sporadic intensity but not in overall bitterness the continuing Anglo-Irish struggle, begun many centuries ago and marked in the twentieth century by the Easter Rising (1918), the partition of Ireland (1922), and the move to Commonwealth status (1937) and to Republic (1949) for the South.

World War II, however, justly overshadowed all other military events of the twentieth century and exerted such an influence on the course of the English novel that the number of fictional works about Britain’s “finest hour” has grown astronomically since 1945. World War II may have passed into cultural memory, but it remained, for whole generations, a recent event of personal history that also marks the beginning of the “postmodern” world. Shortly after the war, beginning around 1947, the empire was virtually dismantled, and more than one billion people throughout the world gained political independence.

The Proletarian Novel and the Novel of Social Criticism

The British economy was sapped by expensive modern warfare, the rapid dissolution of the empire, and the immigration of large numbers of the middle class; it was plagued by taxation (marked by the establishment of the first modern social security system, in 1912, and later by the socialistic British welfare state, 1945-1951), devastated by the Great Depression of 1929 and the wholesale destruction of property in the Battle of Britain and the subsequent saturation bombing of London, and eroded by massive unemployment and the steady devaluation of the pound sterling. These events and their economic effects form a background for the rise of the proletarian novel and the novel of social criticism of the 1950’s and subsequent decades, including works by Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), John Braine (1922-1986), John Wain (1925-1994), and Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010), who are now known as the Angry Young Men.

Social issues that occasioned the protests of the Victorian novelists were largely resolved during the last decades of Victoria’s reign, ceased to have the same importance in the years when Edward VII was monarch (1901-1910), and, except for the extension of the voting franchise to women (1928), became legally moot in the early years of George V’s reign. A divergent set of social issues replaced them for twentieth century novelists such as John Galsworthy (1867-1933), H. G. Wells (1866-1946), Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), and George Moore (1852-1933). Galsworthy, for example, captured the decline and disintegration of Victorian/Edwardian pillars of the middle class into the “lost generation” of the 1920’s, and in so doing raised lapsarian questions that contribute to a “modernist” sensibility. Wells, apart from his socialist propaganda, also examined the possibilities of dehumanization and the inevitable destructiveness of the retrograde evolution of English class, social, and scientific structures. Bennett and Moore, like Galsworthy, pilloried the bourgeoisie and Victorianism generally, and both imported techniques from the French naturalistic novel to do so. Although French and other Continental writers exerted considerable influence on the cultural development of the English novel from roughly the mid-nineteenth century onward (one finds such influences extending from the novels of George Eliot to those of Henry James), it is noteworthy that the anti-Victorian writers should employ the naturalistic technique of Balzac and Zola in their novelistic experiments.

The form of the novel, as established in the eighteenth century, had evolved but had not drastically changed throughout the nineteenth century. With the influx of the French aesthetic, symbolist, and decadent literature in the 1890’s, and the experiments of Bennett and Moore, the stage was set for more radical experiments with the English novel, experiments that centered primarily on the traditional focus of the novel, character, and subordinated all else to it. One must look to the Anglicized American, Henry James (1843-1916), as a primary source for the experimental novel, even if James did remain clearly within the confines of the English novelistic tradition. By emphasizing such elements as angle of narration, the capturing of actual experience and the way people are, the primacy of individual psychology, and the disappearance of the traditional hero, James prepared the way for further experiments by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce (1882-1941), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), and Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), among others. In their fiction variations on the modernist questions of ultimate meaning, individual responsibility, and elemental issues of guilt, moral alienation and dehumanization, and atonement find enduring expression as each writer searches for individual answers to similar questions. Whether the scope of the search is global, as in Conrad’s settings throughout the empire, or intensely local, as in Joyce’s Dublin, Lawrence’s Nottinghamshire, or the mind of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, it is the same inner search. In the light of the experimental novels of the twentieth century, Tristram Shandy no longer seems the oddity it once appeared to be.

Differing from the vast quantity of twentieth century English novels written in the authorized veins of bourgeois or antibourgeois traditions, the abundant novels of adventure, detection, mystery, romance (in all senses), espionage and humor—all forms in which society is reflected and sees itself—the experimental novel provided a different sort of novelistic focus, the novel of social criticism and satire in which the protagonist is no longer concerned with a place in society but is, as his or her American cousins have been since the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, most frequently an outsider who seeks to preserve and justify alienation from a disordered and dissolving society and culture. Set adrift from intellectual, social, religious, and cultural stability and identity, the interbellum generation (1918- 1939) and the postwar or postmodern generations consistently emphasize the futility of human community under the social contract. Not only the Angry Young Men but also their predecessors, successors, and contemporaries such as Ronald Firbank (1886-1926), Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), George Orwell (1903-1950), William Golding (1911- 1993), Graham Greene, and John le Carré engage in social criticism and satire that ranges from assailing the societal, mechanistic, technocratic trivializing of human dignity to asserting the necessity of a solitary quest for personal ethics in an era that lacks an ethical superstructure and in which organized religion is one among many residual elements of limited use.

Multiculturalism in the Novel

Beginning in the last half of the twentieth century, a reinvigorated strain of fiction came to reflect the growing ethnic diversity of England’s people and their multicultural character and global concerns, as many Commonwealth writers and expatriates chose England as their residence and principal forum. In addition, the growing genre of postcolonial fiction gave writers from the former British colonies new themes, genres, and readers. Three writers of the 1980’s amply illustrate this diversity. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954; his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), is narrated by a Japanese widow, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, who is living in England. An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is the story of an old Japanese painter oppressed by guilt over the prostitution of his art in the service of Japanese imperialism. With his universally acclaimed third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), winner of the Booker Prize, Ishiguro made a bold leap; here his first-person narrator is an English butler in the mid-1950’s, a figure at once comic and poignant. The first-person narrator of When We Were Orphans (2000) is also an Englishman, but one who grew up in colonial Shanghai in the 1930’s. The Unconsoled (1995) is Ishiguro’s exploration of a dreamscape so ambiguous that it thoroughly upsets traditional narrative concepts. The main character, Mr. Ryder, finds that his conflicted past and his insecurities about his future transform everything he encounters into a surreal dream of reality. This defamiliarization from the real is one of the universal themes that Ishiguro gravitated toward in rejection of the earlier emphasis on the lapse between Japanese and English cultural identities. In either case, his fiction cautions that “we tend to think we’re in far more control than we are.” This confusion about identity and lack of control is fully realized in Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (2005), which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best British science fiction novel of the year.

Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1947, was educated in England. His novel Midnight’s Children (1981) views the partition of India and the creation of the independent Muslim state of Pakistan through the lens of Magical Realism. The novel was chosen, on the fortieth anniversary of the Booker Prize, as the Best of the Booker, the best of the novels ever to have won the coveted prize. Shame (1983) covers much of the same territory. Rushdie achieved international notoriety with his Joycean novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), a great wheel of a book that was condemned by Muslim fundamentalists for what they considered blasphemous treatment of the Qurãn and of the life of Muhammad. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a children’s book written for adults as well, Rushdie, threatened with death and forced into hiding, answers his critics with a celebration of storytelling and the unconstrained imagination. His return to the context of improbable reality in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) offers readers a heightened emphasis on storytelling as a theme. Rushdie returned to the theme of partition with Shalimar the Clown (2005), set in Kashmir, but he set The Enchantress of Florence (2008) squarely in the fifteenth century, in Italy, and in the realm of fantasy.

V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018), a Trinidadian-born British writer whose heritage is Indian, is a leading figure in postcolonial literature and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. His novella, In a Free State (1971), the first book by a writer of Indian descent to win the Booker Prize, is set in a newly independent East African country, modeled on Kenya, which became independent from Great Britain in 1963. A Bend in the River (1979), also set in Africa, is narrated by an Indian shopkeeper who fits in neither with the Africans nor with their former colonizers. In Half a Life (2001) and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004), Naipaul depicts an Indian writer who moves to London and then to Africa. Naipaul has been criticized by postcolonial theorists for his apparent sympathies with the colonizers rather than with the colonized, but his Nobel citation praised him “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

Women writers have used fiction to tell neglected stories in multicultural Great Britain. Beryl Gilroy (1924-2001) was born in what was then British Guyana, now the independent nation of Guyana. She traveled to Great Britain to study at the University of London, and she became a teacher, a psychotherapist specializing in the needs of black women and children, and a writer. Her first novel for adults, Frangipani House (1986), is set among the elderly in Guyana, and Boy-Sandwich (1989) depicts the experiences of young black boys in Great Britain’s large cities. Bangladeshi British author Monica Ali (born 1967) shows the struggles faced by women in London’s Bangladeshi neighborhoods in Brick Lane (2003), which was adapted as a feature film in 2007. White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith (born 1975), is about the moral and psychological struggles of immigrants, and her On Beauty (2005) explores the life of a mixed-race family.

Less emphatically concerned with diversity issues, A. S. Byatt (born 1936) and Julian Barnes (born 1946) seem to have inherited the position of authorial status occupied by the writers of the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Their novels exhibit such sophisticated strategies that in some cases, such as Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) and Arthur and George (2005), they are considered “post-postmodern.” Byatt’s works tend to focus on intellectual problems characteristic of past eras, such as allegorical representation common to the Renaissance, evidenced in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), and deistic wrangling over biblical stories, in Babel Tower (1996). Byatt translates these pedantic puzzles into contemporary English life, providing relevance for both the society she writes about and the history of ideas that influences them. She often combines modern and historical characters in one novel, as in the Booker Prize-winning Possession (1990) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000), both of which tell the stories of intellectual figures from history and the scholars who study them.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Ian McEwan (born 1948) emerged as one of the leading writers of the English novel. The author of several novels as well as short stories, screenplays, poetry, a play, an opera, and books for children, he won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998), a novel about a composer and a newspaper editor struggling with moral questions, hatred, and vengeance. A feature film adaptation of Atonement (2002), McEwan’s most popular work, was released in 2007. This novel also deals with the consequences of making moral missteps. His 15th novel Machines Like Me was published in 2019.

The English novel, then, to paraphrase William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, holds the mirror up to society and shows the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure. Even a brief sketch of the varied patterns of societal influences on the development of the English novel demonstrates that the novel is of all literary forms the most responsive to the changing emphases of an evolving society. Whether in overt reaction to the values of a society, in praise of them or in criticism of them, the novel consistently presents the society as the individual must confront it, explains that society to itself, and helps society to define itself.

Bibliography Adams, Percy G. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction: From “The Castle of Otranto” to “Hawksmoor.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. David, Dierdre, ed. Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Horsman, Alan. The Victorian Novel. New York: Clarendon Press, 1990. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. McKee, Patricia. Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel, 1764-1878. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Parrinder, Patrick. Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Richetti, John, et al., eds. The Columbia History of the British Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Roberts, Andrew Michael, ed. The Novel: AGuide to the Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day. London: Bloomsbury, 1994.

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• Ina Lipkowitz

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As taught in, learning resource types, major english novels, assignments, course assignments.

There are two assignments for this course: Early Novels assignment and 19th-20th Century Novels assignment. The details for each assignment are given below.

Early Novels Assignment (7 - 10 pages, due in Ses #13)

1. “The novel differs from the prose romance in that a greater degree of realism is expected of it, and that it tends to describe a recognizable secular social world, often in a skeptical and prosaic manner inappropriate to the marvels of romance.” Dictionary of Literary Terminology, 152.

2. “What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel’s formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for its realism.” Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 13.

3. “The novel could be considered established only when realistic narrative was organized into a plot which, while retaining Defoe’s lifelikeness, also had an intrinsic coherence; when the novelist’s eye was focused on character and personal relationships as essential elements in the total structure, and not merely as subordinate instruments for furthering the verisimilitude of the actions described; and when all these were related to a controlling moral intention.” Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 131.

or choose one of the following:

4. Moll Flanders purports to be an autobiography; Evelina is told in letters; and Pride and Prejudice features a third person narrator. Are these narrative styles a matter of chronology (i.e. dictated by the time in which the novels were written?) or of authorial choice? How do the different narrative styles force you to read differently?

5. “The history of a young inconsiderate girl, whose little foibles, without any natural vices of the mind, involve her in difficulties and distresses, which, by correcting, make her wise, and deservedly happy in the end. A heroine like this, cannot but lay an author under much disadvantage… It is a barren foundation for a novel.” Ralph Griffith’s review of Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless , Monthly Review, 1751. If the history of a young girl is but a “barren foundation” for a novel, why did so many early novels concern themselves with precisely that?

19th-20th Century Novels Assignment (7 - 10 pages, due in Ses #26)

1. “Many critics of the novel have implicitly or explicitly separated canonical authors, such as Richardson, Austen, Dickens, and Eliot, from the popular novels that influenced them and along side of which their work was read, in the interest of constructing a high-culture novel tradition. Popular genres, such as the sensation novel, are consigned to second-rate status through a process that often replicates nineteenth-century discourses suspicious of working-class readers, female audiences, and affectively powerful or nonrealist literature.” Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, 15. (Suggested novels: Adam Bede , Lady Audley’s Secret .)

2. “In the second half of the novel, Mrs Gaskell retreated from the implications of the moving record of distress presented in the first half, falling back on literary convention to eschew the social and political issues raised by the very originality and authenticity of her account… Perhaps the exigencies of the novel form were as much to blame as were Mrs Gaskell’s own politics. What made the novel an instant success was its capacity to bring to life the large-scale social problems reported in a plethora of parliamentary reports and blue books. Only a novel, with its focus upon the individual and particular, could correct the generalized abstractions of official documents and statistics: yet the novel demanded plot momentum and narrative resolution in a situation where irresolution and intractability were the keynotes.” Josie Billington, “Elizabeth Gaskell” (Suggested novels: Mary Barton , Adam Bede , Lady Audley’s Secret , Tess of the D’Urbervilles. )

3. “Hetty is a subject till that last moment on the road, before she abandons the baby. From that point on she is an object: of confession and conversion, of attitudes toward suffering. This is the essential difference from Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles which has the strength to keep to the subject to the end. Adam Bede and Dinah Morris—as one might say the dignity of self-respecting labour and religious enthusiasm—are more important in the end. Even the changed repentant Arthur is more important than the girl whom the novelist abandons, in a moral action more decisive than Hetty’s own confused and desperate leaving of her child.” Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, 82-3. (Suggested novels: Mary Barton , Adam Bede , Lady Audley’s Secret , Tess of the D’Urbervilles .)

4. “The Dorset in which Hardy grew up… was, of course, the basis for the Wessex of his fiction-a landscape that in some respects has fairly been said to suggest the timelessness characteristic of rural ballads; but Hardy’s Wessex should also be seen as a traditional society under attack by the forces of industrialization. Whereas the novels of Dickens, Gaskell, and others depict the hardship caused by the industrial revolution on the urban poor, Tess clearly shows how rural industry was far from being untouched by hardship, caused by soulless mechanization. Typically, however, the harsher undertones of Wessex life have in the public mind been often diluted or lost in a wash of nostalgic rural Englishness.” Sarah Maier, “Introduction” to Broadview edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles , 15. (Suggested novels: Mary Barton , Adam Bede , Tess of the D’Urbervilles .)

5. “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life.” George Eliot, Review of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s The Natural History of the German People as a Foundation of German Social Politics, 1856. (Suggested novels: Mary Barton , Adam Bede , Tess of the D’Urbervilles .)

or choose one of the following on Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway :

6. “She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.” Why do you think Woolf constructed her novel around two such different, yet obviously paralleled, central characters?

7. Mrs Dalloway’s marriage plot—the standard feature of the nineteenth-century novel—is very clearly in the past. What other features of more traditional novels that we’ve read this semester does Woolf either transform or reject outright? What does she replace them with? Why?

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The Paris Assignment

Written by Rhys Bowen Review by Joanne Vickers

Paris, 1931. Bowen’s story has a conventional beginning: Naïve young English girl, Madeleine Grant, goes to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and immediately falls for a charming French journalist, Giles Martin. He disappears, re-appears, gets her pregnant, and marries her. Flash forward eight years when the Nazis overwhelm Paris. Giles, half-Jewish and rising star of the political left, joins the resistance forces, and sends his wife and their son Olivier back to her family in England.

The novel becomes compellingly complicated at this point. Madeleine must deal with the Blitz in London and decides to send her son to the country for safety. Almost immediately, she learns that he has been killed when his train was bombed. Heartbroken, she enlists in the British secret service. Bowen painstakingly describes the difficult and extensive mental and physical training that women candidates receive before they are allowed to go to France to work undercover against the Nazis. The women Madeleine trains with are an engaging group of different personalities who enliven the plot.

Meanwhile, the reader discovers that Olivier’s identity has become confused with another boy. Surviving a concussion, but confused about his circumstances, he is sent off to Australia as an orphan where he lives on a farm run by brutal Irish nuns.

The novel alternates between Olivier’s and Madeleine’s experiences. Bowen perfectly develops both narratives with absorbing details about several characters and different geographical environments. And she tops her story off with a realistic, satisfying ending!

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The Rise of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century

“We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that we exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh—Is it worth while? What is the point of it all?” – Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” 1919

The Novel as a Literary Genre

While historians argue about the “first” novel, the definition of the novel could be a separate argument itself. With the different perspectives associated with the novel, the definition as it emerged in the 18th century included many facets. Different definitions of the novel include: an imaginative re-creation of reality, a history, a scary conveyor of truth that demanded scrutiny, a biography, a harmless amusement, a travel narrative, a romance, a tale of spiritual journey. Despite the contradictions that exist within these varying perspectives on the 18th century novel, several key features among them can be picked out as components of the novel as a new textual medium.

Contamporaneity became a common theme within the novels, writers were more inclined to show the life of the present day versus life as it was in the past. Characters and events were made to be believable, as if to mirror the people and events in the every day world of the time, lending the novels credibility. Characters within the stories were presented in a manner similar in social rank to the people reading the novels, not as kings or queens; this afforded a level of familiarity with the readers. With familiarity, readers were able to identify and empathize with characters in the novel. Writers also began to reject traditional plot types; stereotypical plots such as those found in earlier aristocratic stories were avoided. Instead, writers paid greater attention to self-consciousness and the process of thought. As a result, stories reflected more of their individualism and subjectivity. They were engaging ideologies and composed with a guiding design that created presiding themes. On occasion novels would digress, but in a way that operated under the pattern and design guiding the plot. Despite these improvements, some people were afraid of the novel’s rise into literature. Why was the novel scary? First, it demanded scrutiny; it appeared to look into the very reality of the reader himself. Secondly, it conveyed a scale of truth. Author Joel Weinsheimer claims that “the legitimate end of fiction is the conveyance of truth” (3). Whose truth was conveyed? Everyone’s. The novel created “a true world, familiar and recognizable to shoemakers and philosophers alike” (3). Ultimately, with its variety of definitions and various features, the novel emerged as a literary form about people and experiences familiar and to its readers.

Evolution of the Novel Form

In the 21st century, where the novel is quite possible the most popular form of literature, it is hard for one to believe that its form is relatively novel for the world. Prior to the 18th century, there were no known literary pieces in existence that fit the definition of a “novel” (refer to above section for definition). Before discussing the novel itself, it is important to examine its evolution. Traditionalism in literature was a key to success prior to the latter half of the eighteenth century. Authors such as Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, were responsible for telling stories in which the people were familiar with. The fiction that was produced before the introduction and development of the novel were never based on actual people but on characters whom everyone was familiar with, Hercules, Adam and Eve, etc. Thus, the success of an author was mainly based on whether or not he could re-invent an already popular story and model the traditional classics from the days of yore. According to Ian Watt, author of The Rise of the Novel: Studies of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding , Daniel Defoe was the first author to truly break the “protocol” of story telling. Usually, writers were rated on how well they represented historical events and/or their ability to re-tell stories that everyone had already heard. Defoe, in the eighteenth century, pulled away from this tendency of re-telling stories and began to develop protagonist characters that were new to the literary world. Defoe began writing novel-like works about a character and their life, often using autobiographical information to fuel his writing (14-15).

www.librarycompany.org 1719 Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

www.library.usyd.edu.au 1726 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

Author Ian Watt, and many others for that matter, usually credit Daniel Defoe as being the author of the first English novel (Chapt. 3). The first novel is usually credited to be Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe which was first published in 1719 (Lee). The novel is about a man, Crusoe, who spent 28 years on a deserted island and the adventures in which he encountered while on the island. However, this is debatable and a “true” first novel has not really been absolutely unanimously determined. Some critics claim that other stories such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels are actually just a series of stories about one character and his experiences. There is not a truly lengthy series of events that take place with one protagonist over a prolonged period of time; rather, the character simply re-enacts bits and pieces of his life that the author feels is interesting enough to reiterate. Therefore, stories like Robinson Crusoe stand up as much more likely candidates as true “novels” because Defoe explains the entire life of the protagonist, even the seemingly mundane details. Thus, other novels began to be written in succession after Defoe’s first. Next, there was the publication in 1740 of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (Lee). Followed by a multitude of other books that would be termed “novels” such as Henry Fielding ‘s Joseph Andrews . After these first novelists became successful, a menagerie of other authors would quickly evolve in the years to come. Authors like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen ‘s to name a few, would soon become some of the world’s most famous novelists having perfected the art of the novel. The following time line shows the evolution of the novel through the eighteenth century:

17th Century 1660 Birth of Daniel Defoe . 1660-1669 Diary of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). 1665 Great Plague destroys much of London’s population. 1667 Milton’s Paradise Lost . 1678 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress 1687 Newton’s Principia Mathematica . 1688 Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is published. Telling the story of the violence of the slave trade, it is one of the earliest examples of English literature by a woman. 1689 John Locke argues that Parliament needs to be divided into the executive and legislature. Bill of Rights and Toleration Act. Birth of Samuel Richardson . 1695 Press allowed to become free.

18th Century 1702 Daily newspaper appears for first time. 1707 The Act of Union unites Scotland and England. Birth of Henry Fielding . 1713 Birth of Laurence Sterne . 1719 Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe . 1722 Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders . 1726 Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels . 1740 Pamela or Virtue Rewarded , by Samuel Richardson . 1749 Henry Fielding ‘s Tom Jones . 1755 Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) publishes his English dictionary. 1758 Voltaire’s Candide mocks the religious establishment. Shortly afterwards Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishe Emile and Social Contract . 1764 Birth of Ann Radcliffe . 1771 Birth of Walter Scott . 1774 Reforms to prisons begun at the behest of Howard. Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther . 1775 American war of independence from Britain begins. American Declaration of Independence follows in 1776. War with America continues until 1783. James Watt invents steam engine. The pace of industrialization and urbanization accelerates as a result. Birth of Jane Austen . 1789-1832 Romantic period in the arts emphasizes individuality, subjectivity and irrationality, rejecting the rationalism of the earlier Enlightenment .

19th century 1810 Birth of Elizabeth Gaskell . 1812 Birth of Charles Dickens . 1813 Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . 1816 Birth of Charlotte Bronte. 1818 Birth of Emily Bronte .

(This time line has been edited to only include names of authors and other people relevant to the topic of the novel. Please click here to see the time line in its entirety. )

Historical Context of the Rise of the Novel:

Although the early 18th century was Britain’s golden age of satire, the Teaching Company’s novel expert Dr. Timothy Spurgin notes that the mid-to-late 1700s segued into its golden age of fiction. Indeed, several factors favored the emergence of the novel at the time. (Spurgin, The English Novel. ) (Watt, The Rise of the Novel .)

Rise of realism–the novel as an effect of the Enlightenment

After the start of the Scientific Revolution, people began applying the newfangled deductive method to all sorts of social concerns. Specifically, Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and Rene Descartes proposed that individuals could discern important truths about life through careful observation of details, and no longer had to rely upon the establishment for their intellectual enrichment. Writers picked up on this trend and penned a new genre that focused on realism–books that had believable plots and believable characterizations–and a public already primed on realistic fare such as biographies, memoirs and personal journals eagerly embraced the English novel. (Brooklyn College’s Guide to the Study of Literature .) (Sutherland, Classics of British Literature .)

Rise of the middle class–the novel as an offshoot of capitalism:

While the populace was busy looking for new ways to educate itself about the world, Britain was busy becoming the world’s first capitalist economy. As a result, the country’s middle classes expanded, and they became obsessed with ways of increasing their income and social standing. And for the first time in British history, a subject’s social standing did not depend upon inheritance, but upon ambition. Authors catered to this potential reading public by writing works about love and marriage—works in which the main characters married up the social ladder. (Previously, novelists had been patronized by rich benefactors and confined their serious pieces to classical concerns.) Still, one vestige of Britain’s fading feudal system was its paternalistic tradition that the ruling classes should provide for society’s poorer members. This tradition translated into an early English novel convention of producing stories with happy endings; stories in which virtuous working women were absorbed into their libidinous masters’ aristocratic homes. (Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is a good example of this convention, in which a servant girl marries a master who had pressured her to become his mistress. ) At any rate, if the elites didn’t mind marrying down, the uppity middle classes seemed to consider it taboo–see the illustration from Punch magazine below, which shares a popular sentiment from England’s industrial age: snubbing your own kin. (Spurgin, The English Novel .) (Sutherland, Classics of British Literature .)

Rise of commercial fiction–the novel as an affordable and available literary form:

Besides giving members of the lower classes new riches and reasons to drop their old friends, another benefit of the Industrial Revolution was bringing affordable books to the masses through the creation of commercial printing houses. As it went, after the book industry noticed the public demand for the novel, it upgraded its infrastructure and increased its output in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, on account of 18th-century technological advances in printing. Once the new presses were in place, publishers kept them profitable by persuading novelists to put out salable works. Thus, the novel changed form from rare manuscripts circulated in rarefied circles, to the popular published form sold today. (Sutherland, Classics of British Literature .) (Weiner, The Long 19th Century .)

Rise of literacy and lending libraries–the novel as a product of Puritan values:

Not all Britain’s people prospered from industrialization–many members of the working classes still couldn’t read or afford to buy novels at retail. To bridge this gap and build public education, concerned philanthropic groups established literacy programs and lending libraries. These lending libraries preferred novels that were published in three volumes, so they could spread out their titles between borrowers. As a consequence, the early English novelists wrote their works following a formula that put a cliffhanger in each volume. One downside to the novel’s Puritan sponsorship was the accompanying Puritan censorship. In time, writers grew weary of watching their words, and of breaking their works into multiple editions after their fellow countrymen could well afford to buy their own copies. By the close of the Victorian age, then, a more prosperous and less pious reading public no longer patronized lending libraries, and the era of the serial novel came to an end. (Bucholz, Foundations of Western Civilization II .) (Sutherland, Classics of British Literature .)

Works Cited:

Bucholz, Robert, D.Phil. Foundations of Western Civilization II: A History of the Modern Western World . Course guidebook. Virginia: The Teaching Company, 2006. English Department, Brooklyn College. A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature . 20 May, 2008. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/guide.html Hammond, Brean and Shaun Regan. Making the Novel . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Lee, Danny and Sierz Alekis. The Story of the Novel: Timeline . Jul., 2003. 20 May, 2008. <http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/N/novel/timeline.html > Moore, Andrew. Short History of English Literature . 8 May, 2008. < http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/intro.htm></span >> Richetti, John. The English Novel in History . New York: Routledge, 1999. Spurgin, Timothy, Ph.D. The English Novel . Lecture transcript and course guidebook. Virginia: The Teaching Company, 2006. Sutherland, John, Ph.D. Classics of British Literature . Course guidebook. Virginia: The Teaching Company, 2008. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding . London: Chatto and Windus, 1957 Weiner, Robert I., Ph.D. The Long 19th Century: European History from 1789 to 1917 . Course guidebook. Virginia: The Teaching Company, 2005. Weinsheimer, Joel. The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century . Ed. Robert W. Uphaus. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1988.

Contributors:

Historical Development of the Novel

In the following section, we’ll examine the historical development of the novel.

Where to Begin?

A novel is a fictional prose narrative of extensive length. The word derives from the Italian word novella, which means “little new thing.” Longer and more complex than short stories, a novel is not restricted by structure and form as poetry and drama are. The length of a novel allows for a variety of characters, a complicated plot, and character development, unlike the short story.

Literary input from a variety of sources led to the creation of the first modern novel.

One of the biggest influences on the development of the novel came from Spain in 1604—Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Cervantes’ romantic parody offers the reader a view of seventeenth-century Spanish society through the presentation of a wide assortment of characters.

The plot follows the adventures of Alonso Quijano, who has spent far too much time reading stories about chivalry. Alonso, who is considered crazy by friends and family, takes the name Don Quixote and transforms himself into a knight-errant on a mission to redress the wrongs of the world.

English authors in the eighteenth century used Don Quixote as a springboard for the novel as we know it. In 1719, Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, considered the first modern novel. Robinson Crusoe tells the tale of a traveler shipwrecked on an uninhabited tropical island, as indicated by its full title, which follows.

Defoe’s dramatic realism combined with a convincing central character, pirates, and cannibals, virtually guaranteed the novel’s popularity.

Following in Defoe’s footsteps were Jonathan Swift with Gulliver’s Travels, Henry Fielding with Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, and Oliver Goldsmith with Vicar of Wakefield. The modern novel began taking shape during the eighteenth century, and during the next century, it continued to evolve into the most popular literary form.

A New Genre Takes Off

Romanticism of the nineteenth century influenced the direction novelists took the new literary genre. Americans joined in on the act during this time, as did writers from other parts of Europe.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, writers from both sides of the ocean published novels of all varieties, as indicated by the following table.

During the romantic age, gothic novels , such as Frankenstein, were particularly popular. In gothic novels, supernatural elements and a foreboding setting, such as an abandoned house or a dark, spooky castle, take center stage. In the case of Shelley’s novel, the gothic elements revolve around a monster created by Dr. Frankenstein, its quest for sympathy, and, finally, its eventual death.

A sustained interest in romanticism led Sir Walter Scott to set his novels in historic England. For example, Ivanhoe takes place in the period following the Norman Conquest, with characters such as Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart, and numerous knights and fair ladies.

Unlike her colleagues, Jane Austen disdained romanticism. In fact, her novel Northanger Abbey parodies popular gothic novels. The plots of Austen’s novels, such as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, focus on domestic situations, such as betrothals, where manners and fashion are of utmost importance. Her novels exhibit satirical wit, insightful views of human nature, and stylish dialogue, which moves the story along much like a play.

The first two sentences of Pride and Prejudice indicate the story’s direction.

American writers were greatly influenced by their European counterparts. Romantic ideals, like individualism and love of nature, inspired them to add their own ideals and create a truly American literary voice.

Leading the way was James Fenimore Cooper whose novel The Last of the Mohicans contrasts the Native American way of life with the settlers’ desire to build farms and towns. Cooper’s adventure novel sets a fast pace with thrilling attacks, captures, escapes, and heroic rescues.

Rounding out the first half of the century was Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, which delves into the hearts and minds of characters to reveal their moral dilemmas. Hawthorne’s psychological romance laced with gothic elements proved to be a sensation when it was published, and it remains a classic example of great American literature.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, events on both sides of the Atlantic influenced writers. In England, Queen Victoria reigned over a time of progress and prosperity. Railroads became the chosen method of travel, education was expanded, sanitation was improved, and middle-class values, such as hard work, solid morals, and practicality, became the standards of the time.

In the United States, the Civil War broke out in 1861 and did not end until 1865, the same year President Lincoln was assassinated. American ingenuity was in full swing at this time with the inventions of the typewriter, the telephone, and the light bulb.

Novels published during the latter half of the nineteenth century are indicated in the following table.

The most popular Victorian novelist was Charles Dickens. His work combines social criticism with humor in a world of characters that range from the malicious to the suffering. Characters such as Miss Havisham, Pip, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Tiny Tim remain ingrained in the memories of readers. In his novels, Dickens often criticized British prisons and schools, which led to reforms that were badly needed.

Just as Dickens’s novels rely heavily on memorable characters, so do the novels of Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn first appeared as a character in Twain’s popular book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before Twain wrote a novel solely about the runaway orphan and his travels. The story fluctuates between funny, satirical episodes and touching descriptions of the relationship between Huck and Jim.

One of Twain’s most important contributions to the continuing evolution of the novel is the introduction of slang-laden, colloquial dialect, which proved influential to future writers, such as Ernest Hemingway.

In contrast to Dickens’s Victorian novels are the realistic novels by writers such as Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. A realistic novel attempts to give the effect of realism through a work of fiction. Characters in realistic novels have normal daily experiences and interact with other characters within a structured social system.

For example, in Madame Bovary, Flaubert describes the dismal everyday life of an ordinary woman using precise details and realism, as in the following passage from the novel.

Flaubert describes every unpleasant detail of Emma Bovary’s existence, which provides the reader an understanding of her life and her frustrations.

Toward the end of the century, science-fiction novels evolved as a distinct category from the gothic novels of the earlier part of the century. Futuristic scientific developments serve to move the plots of these science-fiction novels.

French writer Jules Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days in the 1870s; H. G. Wells followed with Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The nineteenth century produced a wide variety of novels from all parts of the world, with each one making an important contribution to the development of the modern novel.

Which of the following authors contributed to realism in novels?

• H. G. Wells
• Charles Dickens
• Sir Walter Scott
• Leo Tolstoy

Reveal Answer

The answer is D. Tolstoy’s novels present a realistic impression of Russian life at the time Tolstoy wrote them.

Out with the Old, In with the New

The years immediately following the turn of the century brought many changes. World War I began and Queen Victoria, who symbolized the strict moral code and prosperity of nineteenth-century England, died.

Novelists around the world sought to shake off the old ways of writing and to usher in the new century with new styles, new subject matters, and new narrative techniques. Thus, Modernism was born.

The following table provides a list of some Modernist authors and their novels.

James Joyce is renowned for his literary innovations, including stream of consciousness . Stream of consciousness is a revolutionary narrative technique used to imitate the inner workings of the human mind by providing a continuous stream of thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Joyce’s literature broke new ground and established him as one of the greatest talents of the twentieth century. Joyce used stream of consciousness in his largely autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Using the technique for which he is famous, Joyce delves into the mind of Stephen Dedalus to illustrate the development of Stephen as an artist.

Like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf often used stream of consciousness in her novels. Woolf emphasized the psychological workings of her characters, rather than the story’s plot. In To the Lighthouse, for example, plot, dialogue, and action are secondary to the descriptions of character’s impressions and thoughts.

The novels of D. H. Lawrence explore issues related to psychological health, sexuality, and human relationships. One of the most controversial writers of the twentieth century, Lawrence saw his books banned as obscene, and during World War I he was persecuted for his alleged pro-German sympathies.

Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers tells the story of a young, flourishing artist who is the son of an English coal miner. Attacked upon publication for its frank treatment of sex, the novel has since earned praise and recognition as an example of modern literature.

Although modernist literature varies from author to author, the notion of breaking with tradition links them together.

• A novel is a fictional prose narrative of extensive length.
• Gothic novels with spooky settings focus on the supernatural.
• Realistic novels give the effect of realism by closely examining the lives of characters and their normal, everyday experiences.
• Science-fiction novels use futuristic settings and scientific developments to direct the plot.
• Modernism was a twentieth-century literary innovation. Stream of consciousness developed during the modern period. It is a narrative technique that imitates the thoughts of the human mind.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the paris assignment.

• About the Book

A courageous wife, mother and resister confronts the devastation of World War II in a heartbreaking and hopeful novel by the bestselling author of THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK and THE TUSCAN CHILD.

Londoner Madeleine Grant is studying at the Sorbonne in Paris when she marries charismatic French journalist Giles Martin. As they raise their son, Olivier, they hold on to a tenuous promise for the future. Until the thunder of war sets off alarms in France.

Staying behind to join the resistance, Giles sends Madeleine and Olivier to the relative safety of England, where Madeleine secures a job teaching French at a secondary school. Yet nowhere is safe. After a devastating twist of fate resulting in the loss of her son, Madeleine accepts a request from the ministry to aid in the war effort. Seizing the smallest glimmer of hope of finding Giles alive, she returns to France. If Madeleine can stop just one Nazi, it will be the start of a valiant path of revenge.

Though her perseverance, defiance and heart will be tested beyond imagining, no risk is too great for a brave wife and mother determined to fight and survive against inconceivable odds.

The Paris Assignment by Rhys Bowen

• Publication Date: August 8, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 383 pages
• Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
• ISBN-10: 1662504233
• ISBN-13: 9781662504235

History and Definition of the Novel

A. Novel Writing: History

With origins dating back to poetic prose from thousands of years ago -- Elizabethan times, fanciful French romance narratives from the mid-17th century, and episodic, central-figure adventures from the Spanish Don Quixote era -- novel writing is an art form that has long been an integral part of our culture.

Yet, just because novel writing predates many long-established civilizations, you should not be discouraged from pursuing your dream.

Rather, much evidence points to the fact that even a first-time novelist can achieve great success. Even if success takes the form of personal gratification, that should prove to be a sufficient enough payoff to carry you forward as you embark on this exciting and immensely fulfilling journey.

B. What is a Novel?

1. A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters

2. The literary genre represented by novels

Derived form the Italian word 'novella', the formalized term, "novel," was not used until end of the 18th century. In its infancy, the term was used during the Medieval Period as a literary classification to describe a shortened tale that relayed a generalized sentiment reflective of the society-at-large.

In short, the goal of a novel is to offer the reader a streamlined, cohesive story in which all of the components seamlessly combine to present a statement on the human condition.

In our contemporary world, the use of "novel" has shifted to focus more on the central character, than on the plot. Also playing a defining role in the novel, is the sense of realism. Although novels are developed as fictional stories, the underlying element inherent in all, are truisms based upon human behavior, and the ways in which we interact with others.

Thus, in line with this definition, the plot lines of a novel, though referring to a fictional universe, need to be plausible in the sense they could happen in everyday life. Examples of such humanistic elements include: aging, logical time sequences, conventional ideas; e.g., necessity of travel to distant locales, money (barter) to purchase goods and services, a 24-hour period being composed of phases of day and night.

C. Novel Features

As a whole, the three primary features of a traditional novel include:

It has been said that a work of fiction is measured by how well, or poorly, the author is able to unify the story and control its impact. Therefore, the only obligation of the writer is to make the story flow well for the reader, and have strong elements of interest.

Novel Differentiations

Although the "realism" element may be consistent among all novels, a range of other qualities may be used to differentiate one from another.

For example, while one aim of some novels may be to entertain its readers, others may strive to engage and stimulate readers in an effort to expand their conscious awareness of the greater world in which they live. Others may aspire to reach readers on a more emotional and/or psychological level, by presenting humanistic references in terms of the form of conflicts, fears, and desires.

According to John Braine, the British novelist popular during the 1950s, the novel is the most variable of literary forms, for it has no hard-and-fast rules about subject, technique, or purpose.

D. Classic Examples

Over the years, novels that have remained in our minds and hearts to earn the title of "classic" include: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), and Pride and Prejudice (1813); Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847); Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847); Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850); Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851); Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925); Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926); William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929); and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

E. Novel Definitions by Multiple Masters

According to Nathaniel Hawthorne: As a work of art -- though a novel must conform to certain laws and rules -- it also bears the burden of having to be brutally truthful, albeit truthful based upon the writer's own set of circumstances.

It was Henry James' contention that the purpose of a novel is that of representing life.

In Randall Jarrell's famous definition, he viewed novels as prose narratives, of some length, that reflect real-life situations involving some form of conflict.

And, within the literary work, In The Art of Fiction , John Gardner proclaimed a novel to be akin to a symphony in the sense that its "closing movement echoes and resounds with all that has gone before."

Gardner surmised that the conclusion of a novel reveals hidden connections and causes, and that life, for the time being, becomes unified and organized. Perhaps, most significantly, the novel's respective characters' motives and plans become evident, and we, as the readers, learn the consequences of free will.

F. Can Anyone Write a Novel?

You tend to daydream a lot about writing "The Great American Novel," but does that mean that you will be able to successfully pull it off?

As you have undoubtedly heard countless times before, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything you want.

And while this may be true -- wanting to write a novel, and actually writing it, are entirely different things. In order to produce a novel, you first will need to create a structure around your project, define your objectives, and prioritize this project in your life to ensure you follow it through to completion.

Why would you want to invest what can seem like an inordinate amount of time and effort into the task of writing a novel?

G. Novel Writing: Rewards and Payoffs

Attracted by the following rewards and personal payoffs, many people do go forth with their plans to write a novel:

- Opportunity to hone one's writing skills

- Area over which one does not need to conform to anyone's standards or rules

- Ego-gratification endeavor, culminating in one's name appearing on the book jacket of countless copies

Regardless of what becomes of the finished product -- picked up by a publisher, self-published, bestseller, etc. -- the fact that you stayed the course in writing your novel is something that will remain with you for your entire lifetime.

Committing to the generation of your novel, and seeing it through to completion, is an endeavor that will leave you with a new-found confidence that will carry over on to any project you put before yourself.

Ideally, the following chapters will help you feel more secure with the novel-writing process and, thus, better able to navigate as you head out on this memorable journey.

Akin to running a marathon, writing a novel demands attention to discipline and technique.

In order to complete a 16-plus chapter novel, it is necessary to devise a strategy complete with outline, synopsis, chapter summations, etc. Along with an approach strategy, in order to complete all of the steps required in writing a novel, it may prove invaluable to craft a like-minded work schedule.

Writing Schedules

Thus, in order to acquire a manner of discipline around your novel writing process, the first thing you will want to do (before mapping out the story lines, or fleshing out your characters), is to assess your project in terms of the total time it will require you to invest.

Once you have gained an idea as to the amount of time your novel will demand of you, you will then be able to determine when -- during the course of your busy life -- you will realistically be able to sit down, concentrate, and write.

For some people, the chunk of time they can devote to writing on a daily basis may differ, both in terms of the hour (day/evening), as well as the amount of time (e.g., one hour or three hours) they have available.

And, though the ideal would be for you to write at the same time, and for the same duration, each day, if this is not a schedule to which you can commit, then alternating the times that you devote to writing may be the next best thing.

What if you have a packed day? Between working a full-time job, attending to children or a spouse, and taking care of the household essentials, what if you are truly pressed to find a sufficient amount of time to write your novel. In such circumstances, carefully (and honestly) analyze your schedule to determine where spare pockets of time may exist. For example, while we all think that our lives our overly hectic and filled to the brim, what we may be failing to realize is that throughout the day we tend to unnecessarily waste a great deal of time.

Simply put, if we were to effectively use the time on our writing that we spend aimlessly wandering the Internet or mindlessly watching television, then we should be able to carve out a sufficient number of writing sessions per week.

If restricted time is not a factor for you, consider yourself fortunate. You are one of those people who can choose when and where they ultimately sit down to write. And, though time restrictions may not be your issue, you may still have difficulty, at least in the beginning, exercising the discipline to sit down and focus on your writing.

For those who have the luxury of being able to write at any time during the day, it may be in your best interest to write in the morning. As established novelists have stated, mornings tend to provide a calmer solitude and a fresh perspective, as one has only recently arisen from a long night's sleep. (Hopefully, it was restorative.) Plus, by working in the morning, you do not simply decide to skip your writing session after enduring a long, hard day -- which is all too easy to do!

B. Examples of Authors' Working Schedules

Examples of writers who have found success in scheduling the times they allocate to their writing are:

Barack Obama, the President from Illinois, and author of Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope , has explained that while in the midst of his first term in office as a U.S. Senator, he worked on his writing in the evenings, from approximately to 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., while based in Washington, DC.

Scott Turow, the best-selling mystery-suspense novelist ( Presumed Innocent, Personal Injuries ), has relayed that he was accustomed to writing in the morning, from 8 a.m. to approximately noon. He felt that he was most motivated at this time, and possessed the greatest amount of clarity.

C. Focus/Motivation

After formulating a working writing schedule, you can shift your focus to the best ways for sustaining your motivation and ability to focus solely on your novel.

It is at this point that you may find yourself falling somewhat short in your ability to hold your attention throughout long, intense writing sessions. Fortunately, should you find this to be the case, there are numerous methods you can employ to increase your levels of concentration and motivation.

Capturing your ability to focus on one activity for a sustained period of time, is something that can be greatly enhanced by integrating some form of regular meditation into your life. The simple of act of learning how to sit still, and focus your mind, offers immeasurable benefits. Not only can it increase the satisfaction you derive on a daily basis, it can also contribute to your writing, in terms of allowing you to hold your thoughts for longer periods, and to explore multiple story scenarios without losing sight of the principle idea.

Unfortunately, some aspiring, time-constricted novelists may view meditation to be yet another major consumer of time. However, those who have found time to incorporate meditation into their lives, commonly attest to the sense of calm and serenity they have achieved and are able to apply to their work.

D. Common Problems that Plague Writers

Beyond finding time to write, and being able to attain mental vibrancy and clarity, there exists a plethora of other issues that can beset first-time (as well as, repeat) novelists:

Blank Page Syndrome -- A condition whereby the blankness of the page proves to be overwhelmingly daunting. In layman's terms, the writer is experiencing difficulty coming up with new material; thus, he/she is left staring at a "blank page."

Excessive Revisions -- Rather than moving on to subsequent chapters, some writers have a tendency to obsessively retread and make continual changes to what they have already written. This proves to be distracting and prohibitive in terms of allowing the writer to move forward to writing the next portion of the novel.

Distractions -- For some, simply finding a place where they can go and write, sufficiently removed from the daily grind, where they can keep focus on the novel, tends to present the greatest challenge.

Surfing the Internet -- Even when writers find a nice removed spot (coffee shop, library) in which to work, the simple act of logging onto the Internet to do a bit of research, or check email, can prove to be a writer's very own worst distraction.

While the Internet can be an invaluable source of information, it can also be a time zapper in terms of sidetracking you from your writing, even from your research. It may be best to limit the time you spend seeking out information, or even to shut off (or turn down) your computer's sound, so that you are not distracted by the tone that indicates you have a new email.

The "Day at a Time" Challenge -- It is essential for aspiring novelists to learn how to operate according to the "day at a time" philosophy, whereby they are not bogged down by how in the world they will finish it, or what they will do with the manuscript when they do finish.

This type of futuristic thinking only adds additional stress and anxiety as to how the novel will turn out, and ultimately be received, instead of allowing the novelist to be concerned only with the chapter/sentence at hand.

E. Helpful Novelist Tips

Create an incentive for meeting your daily/monthly/overall writing goals -- If you need to encourage yourself to stay on course, you may want to build in a series of goal-oriented incentives. The incentives you select need only be motivational to you -- not to anyone else.

For example, if you have a fondness for high-end specialty coffees, then reward yourself with one upon finishing each chapter. After completing six chapters, treat yourself to an incrementally greater treat, e.g., a film or live theater performance you have been wanting to see.

And, upon wrapping up the entire novel, do something very, very nice for yourself. Such indulgences may include: a one-hour massage, new outfit or a piece of jewelry, or dinner at a four-star restaurant.

While you are attempting to stay focused and encouraged, it is essential that you take good care of yourself to ensure that your productivity and the quality of your work do not suffer.

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The History of the Novel: From Its Origins to the Present

The History of the Novel: From Its Origins to the Present: We all love reading Novels. Maybe some of us aren’t into reading but there won’t be a person who will be unaware of Novels and their impact. The impact of Novels on human civilization and pop culture is unparalleled. Be it entertainment, lifestyle habits, social depiction or fantasy and imagination Novels have somewhat shaped our society and lifestyle.

What is a Novel

History and evolution of novels, earliest novels, the rise of the novel, english novels, romanticism, victorian novels, realism and naturalism, modern novels, postmodern novels.

A novel is a book-length story that is written in prose and is meant to be read for entertainment. The word “novel” comes from the Italian word “novella,” which means “new” or “short story of something new.” It is derived from the Latin word “novella,” which is the singular form of the neuter plural “novellus,” which means “new”. The novel is a genre of prose fiction that typically depicts a complex narrative structure and realistic characters who undergo significant personal and psychological development.

Margaret Doody, a literary critic and scholar, has argued that the novel has “a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years,” with its roots in a wide range of literary traditions. The ancient Greek and Roman novel, for example, featured long, episodic narratives that often drew on mythology and folklore. The chivalric romance, a genre that flourished in medieval Europe, featured tales of knights and their adventures, often set in a fantastical or exotic setting.

The origins of the novel can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman literature, as well as to the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The novel as we know it today, however, is largely a product of the 18th and 19th centuries, when it became a popular and influential form of literature in Europe and the Americas.

The novel as a genre has undergone significant evolution over the centuries, and different definitions of what constitutes a novel have emerged. Some, including M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott, have argued that a novel should be defined as a fiction narrative that provides a realistic depiction of the state of a society. Others, however, have argued that the novel encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvelous or uncommon incidents, and can include elements of the romance genre.

The novel has a long and rich history, with its roots stretching back to ancient Greek and Roman literature. The earliest novels include classical Greek and Latin prose narratives from the first century BC to the second century AD, such as Chariton’s Callirhoe, which is considered by some to be the earliest surviving Western novel. Other early novels include Petronius’ Satyricon, Lucian’s True Story, Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and the anonymous Aesop Romance and Alexander Romance.

Narrative forms also developed in Classical Sanskrit in the 5th through 8th centuries, such as Vasavadatta by Subandhu, Daśakumāracarita and Avantisundarīkathā by Daṇḍin, and Kadambari by Banabhatta. These early novels laid the foundations for the genre and established some of the conventions that continue to shape it today, such as the use of character development and psychological depth to create a sense of realism.

The modern European novel is often said to have begun with Don Quixote in 1605, although it was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that the novel became a popular and influential form of literature in Europe and the Americas. During this time, the novel underwent significant evolution and development, with writers such as Walter Scott and Jane Austen making significant contributions to the genre. The rise of the publishing industry and the invention of the printing press also played a key role in the proliferation of the novel as a form of literature.

The English novel has a long and rich history, with its roots stretching back to the medieval period. Some of the earliest English novels include romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written in the 14th century, and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which was written in the 15th century.

Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement that emerged in the late 18th century and flourished in the 19th century. It was characterized by a focus on emotion, imagination, and nature, and it rejected the rationalism and Enlightenment values of the previous era. Gothic fiction, a strain of the romantic novel, emphasizes the supernatural and often features dark, mysterious settings and characters.

During the first half of the 19th century, many novels were influenced by romanticism, including Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. These novels are known for their emphasis on emotion, imagination, and the supernatural, as well as their complex and fully-developed characters. Romanticism had a significant impact on the development of the novel as a genre, and many of the conventions and themes of the romantic novel continue to influence literature today.

The Victorian novel refers to novels that were written during the reign of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (1837-1901). The Victorian period was a time of great social, economic, and cultural change, and this is reflected in the literature of the time. Victorian novels often deal with themes such as industrialization, urbanization, and class conflict, as well as issues of gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

Some of the most famous Victorian novels include Charles Dickens’ works such as Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. These novels are known for their realistic portrayal of Victorian society and for their complex and fully-developed characters.

Realism and naturalism are two literary movements that emerged in the 19th century and had a significant impact on the development of the novel as a genre. Realism is a literary movement that emerged in the mid-19th century and was characterized by a focus on realism and objectivity. Realist novelists sought to depict the world as it really is, with a focus on everyday life, social problems, and the inner lives of characters. Some of the most famous realist novelists include Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, and Leo Tolstoy.

Naturalism is a literary movement that emerged in the late 19th century and was influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Naturalist novelists sought to depict the world as a deterministic, mechanistic place, with characters driven by their primal instincts and social conditions. Naturalist novelists often depicted characters struggling against the harsh realities of the world and their own limitations. Some of the most famous naturalist novelists include Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, and Jack London.

Both realism and naturalism had a significant impact on the development of the novel as a genre and continue to influence literature today.

The modern novel refers to novels that were written during the 20th and 21st centuries. Modern novels are characterized by their innovation and experimentation with form and style, and they often deal with themes such as individualism, alienation, and the role of the artist in society.

Some of the most famous modern novels include James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. These novels are known for their innovative use of language and their exploration of the inner lives of their characters. Other notable modern novelists include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J.D. Salinger. The modern novel continues to evolve and change, with new writers and new styles emerging.

Postmodernism is a literary and cultural movement that emerged in the mid-20th century and was characterized by a rejection of traditional narrative and aesthetic conventions. Postmodern novels often challenge the idea of objective truth and seek to destabilize the reader’s expectations and assumptions.

Some of the most famous postmodern novels include Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. These novels are known for their use of unconventional narrative structures, their incorporation of elements from popular culture, and their exploration of themes such as the role of technology in society and the nature of identity.

Also Read: History of English Literature (Literary Periods and Movements)

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novel assignment

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Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced

What is history.

Most people believe that history is a "collection of facts about the past." This is reinforced through the use of textbooks used in teaching history. They are written as though they are collections of information. In fact, history is NOT a "collection of facts about the past." History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time. Historians often disagree over what "the facts" are as well as over how they should be interpreted. The problem is complicated for major events that produce "winners" and "losers," since we are more likely to have sources written by the "winners," designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.

History in Your Textbook

Many textbooks acknowledge this in lots of places. For example, in one book, the authors write, "The stories of the conquests of Mexico and Peru are epic tales told by the victors. Glorified by the chronicles of their companions, the conquistadors, or conquerors, especially Hernán Cortés (1485-1547), emerged as heroes larger than life." The authors then continue to describe Cortés ’s actions that ultimately led to the capture of Cuauhtómoc, who ruled the Mexicas after Moctezuma died. From the authors’ perspective, there is no question that Moctezuma died when he was hit by a rock thrown by one of his own subjects. When you read accounts of the incident, however, the situation was so unstable, that it is not clear how Moctezuma died. Note: there is little analysis in this passage. The authors are simply telling the story based upon Spanish versions of what happened. There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.   Many individuals believe that history is about telling stories, but most historians also want answers to questions like why did the Mexicas lose?

What Are Primary Sources?

To answer these questions, historians turn to primary sources, sources that were written at the time of the event, in this case written from 1519-1521 in Mexico. These would be firsthand accounts. Unfortunately, in the case of the conquest of Mexico, there is only one genuine primary source written from 1519-1521. This primary source consists of the letters Cortés wrote and sent to Spain. Other sources are conventionally used as primary sources, although they were written long after the conquest. One example consists of the account written by Cortés ’s companion, Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Other accounts consist of Mexica and other Nahua stories and traditions about the conquest of Mexico from their point of view.

Making Arguments in the Textbook

Historians then use these sources to make arguments, which could possibly be refuted by different interpretations of the same evidence or the discovery of new sources.  For example, the Bentley and Ziegler textbook make several arguments on page 597 about why the Spaniards won:

"Steel swords, muskets, cannons, and horses offered Cortés and his men some advantage over the forces they met and help to account for the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire".

"Quite apart from military technology, Cortés' expedition benefited from divisions among the indigenous peoples of Mexico."

"With the aid of Doña Marina, the conquistadors forged alliances with peoples who resented domination by the Mexicas, the leaders of the Aztec empire...."

Ideally, under each of these "thesis statements," that is, each of these arguments about why the Mexicas were defeated, the authors will give some examples of information that backs up their "thesis." To write effective history and history essays, in fact to write successfully in any area, you should begin your essay with the "thesis" or argument you want to prove with concrete examples that support your thesis.  Since the Bentley and Ziegler book does not provide any evidence to back up their main arguments, you can easily use the material available here to provide evidence to support your claim that any one of the above arguments is better than the others.  You could also use the evidence to introduce other possibilities:  Mocteuzuma's poor leadership, Cortés' craftiness, or disease.

Become a Critical Reader

To become a critical reader, to empower yourself to "own your own history," you should think carefully about whether the evidence the authors provide does in fact support their theses.  Since the Bentley and Ziegler book provides only conclusions and not much evidence to back up their main points, you may want to explore your class notes on the topic and then examine the primary sources included on the Conquest of Mexico on this web site.

Your Assignment for Writing History with Primary Sources

There are several ways to make this a successful assignment. First, you might take any of the theses presented in the book and use information from primary sources to disprove it—the "trash the book" approach. Or, if your professor has said something in class that you are not sure about, find material to disprove it—the "trash the prof" approach (and, yes, it is really okay if you have the evidence ). Another approach is to include new information that the authors ignored . For example, the authors say nothing about omens. If one analyzes omens in the conquest, will it change the theses or interpretations presented in the textbook? Or, can one really present a Spanish or Mexica perspective?  Another approach is to make your own thesis, i.e., one of the biggest reasons for the conquest was that Moctezuma fundamentally misunderstood Cortés.

When Sources Disagree

If you do work with the Mexican materials, you will encounter the harsh reality of historical research: the sources do not always agree on what happened in a given event. It is up to you, then, to decide who to believe. Most historians would probably believe Cortés’ letters were the most likely to be accurate, but is this statement justified? Cortés was in the heat of battle and while it looked like he might win easy victory in 1519, he did not complete his mission until 1521.  The Cuban Governor, Diego Velázquez wanted his men to capture Cortés and bring him back to Cuba on charges of insubordination.  Was he painting an unusually rosy picture of his situation so that the Spanish King would continue to support him? It is up to you to decide. Have the courage to own your own history! Díaz Del Castillo wrote his account later in his life, when the Spaniards were being attacked for the harsh policies they implemented in Mexico after the conquest.  He also was upset that Cortés' personal secretary published a book that made it appear that only Cortés was responsible for the conquest. There is no question that the idea of the heroic nature of the Spanish actions is clearest in his account. But does this mean he was wrong about what he said happened and why? It is up to you to decide. The Mexica accounts are the most complex since they were originally oral histories told in Nahuatl that were then written down in a newly rendered alphabetic Nahuatl. They include additional Mexica illustrations of their version of what happened, for painting was a traditional way in which the Mexicas wrote history. Think about what the pictures tell us. In fact, a good paper might support a thesis that uses a picture as evidence. Again, how reliable is this material? It is up to you to decide.

One way to think about the primary sources is to ask the questions: (1) when was the source written, (2) who is the intended audience of the source, (3) what are the similarities between the accounts, (4) what are the differences between the accounts, (5) what pieces of information in the accounts will support your thesis, and (6) what information in the sources are totally irrelevant to the thesis or argument you want to make.

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A history of a pivotal era in Palestine wins a top Jewish book prize

( JTA ) — One of the most prestigious prizes in Jewish book publishing has gone to a nonfiction book that, by suggesting how Arabs and Jews might have learned to live together in historic Palestine, offers a glimmer of hope for a better future.

That’s one way to read “Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict,” by the American-Israeli author Oren Kessler. There other way is to see the events described in the book — a period of military and political consolidation by Zionists and near total rejection of a Jewish state by the Palestinians — as the inevitable harbinger of the bloody impasse of the next 88 years. 

In its announcement earlier this month, The Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature said its top prize, $100,000, was going to Kessler’s book for “its nuanced and balanced narrative on the origins of the Middle East conflict with far-reaching implications for our time.” The annual prize is administered in association with the National Library of Israel.

The book focuses on the period between 1936 and 1939, when Arabs living under the British Mandate rose up against a swelling Jewish population and the Brits in charge. Kessler, who has worked for various think tanks as well as the Jerusalem Post, cites estimates that 500 Jews, 250 British servicemen and at least 5,000 Arabs died in the rioting and the ensuing British crackdown.  

In the wake of the violence, Britain’s “Peel Commission” proposed partitioning the mandate into Jewish and Arab states — while placing limits on Jewish immigration. The Zionist establishment, led by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, accepted the proposal; Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the de facto leader of the Palestinian Arab community, rejected the idea and called for jihad.

Kessler calls the events “a story of two nationalisms, and of the first major explosion between them.” The Jews would turn the rebellion to their advantage, by professionalizing their military (with Britain’s help), expanding agriculture and industry and moving into the next tumultuous, tragic decade with the confidence that they could withstand Arab resistance. 

Oren Kessler, author “Palestine 1936.” (Hadas Parush; Rowman & Littlefield)

The Palestinians, meanwhile, emerged from the revolt weakened politically, economically and militarily. Historians on both sides agree that the failure of the revolt set the stage for what the Palestinians call the Nakba — or “catastrophe” — and Israel’s triumph in its 1948 war for independence. 

Although a work of history, the book landed on the eve of Oct. 7, and inevitably offers fuel for the debates central to the protests and counter protests that followed the Hamas attack on Israel and the Israelis’ subsequent war in Gaza: Are the Palestinian Arabs victims of a “settler colonial project,” or their own failed leadership? Can two people so at odds share the land, either by dividing it or creating some sort of confederation? And might knowing this history bring both sides closer to a resolution?

“This is the more optimistic version of the answer,” Kessler told me last week, when I put the last question to him. “I think my book and this chapter in history is full of ‘what if’ questions. The idea that things could have indeed gone differently and that we weren’t fated for endless conflict suggests maybe they still can go differently in the present and the future.”

What if, he asks, Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner for Palestine, had appointed a moderate instead of al-Husseini as grand mufti? What if the two-state solution offered by the Peel Commission report in 1937 had gone through? 

“Jews would have gotten less than 20% of the country and there would have been no Palestinian refugee crisis. There would have been no Nakhba in 1948. The Gaza Strip would not be teeming with refugees today,” Kessler said, describing what he knows are unknowable but still strong possibilities.

As a counter to the mufti, who would later line up with Adolf Hitler and further discredit the Palestinian cause, Kessler offers an extensive treatment of Musa Alami, a Palestinian nationalist known for his relationships with the British and the Jews. Alami met several times with Ben-Gurion during the 1930s, suggesting ways in which Jewish national ambitions might coexist within a regional majority of Arabs, with both sides gaining from the economic and public health progress being made by the Jews. 

“Despite diametrically opposed political aspirations they met in an atmosphere of real candor and respect, and they really tried to reach a modus vivendi, to reach some kind of agreement that both sides could live with,” Kessler explained. “Alami was not a peacenik. He does his part for the Arab Revolt, and then some. He’s not opposed to violence, nor is Ben-Gurion. 

“But I do think his personality was kind of the polar opposite of the mufti’s in his ability to hear the other side, to understand the other side and to try to reach a solution. And it gives a glimpse I think of perhaps what could have been had things gone a bit different.”

A pessimist, Kessler conceded, would reject this hopeful vision out of hand. In the book, as in our interview, Kessler strives to view the emerging Jewish state from the Palestinian perspective. “It’s not that difficult to understand that people who were living in a certain land and whose ancestors have lived there for centuries wouldn’t look all that kindly on another people coming in en masse,” said Kessler. “We don’t need a very active imagination to understand that.” 

But the question, he continued, “is how they responded, how they registered their opposition. And with every rejection by the Arabs in Palestine, their position got worse and worse and it continues to this day.”

Kessler mostly leaves it to readers to decide if the lessons of the 1930s are useful in 2024. He’d also like his book to be seen as a lens on a time period that hasn’t gotten its due, at least in English, and one that has “so many fascinating, complex and compelling characters on all three sides of the Palestine triangle: the Jews, the Arabs and the British.”  

They include household names such as Winston Churchill and Ben-Gurion, and more obscure figures like Orde Wingate, the Bible-thumping British military strategist who helped build up the Jewish army and liked to greet visitors in the nude. 

But at the end of the book he returns to Musa Alami, who lived most of the rest of his long life (he died in 1984) exiled from his native Jerusalem, raising money and international support for Arab refugee youths living in Jordan.

In an interview after the Six-Day War, Alami offered both sides a prescient warning that sounds what Kessler calls “a note of hope”: “ You are not considering the future — you are only considering the present,” he told the Israelis. “And we are not considering the distant future — only our present suffering. But I do believe, still now, that this country has the makings of peace.”

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The formerly enslaved lawmaker who warned about rewriting Black history

This article is adapted from “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It,” published Tuesday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

More than a century before the backlash to the post-George Floyd racial reckoning produced book bans and restrictions on Black history curriculums, a pioneering Black lawmaker wrote a landmark critique of White historians’ attempt to rewrite the narrative of the Reconstruction era.

In 1913, John Roy Lynch published “The Facts of Reconstruction,” one of the first histories of the era written by a Black leader who participated in the South’s transformation after the Civil War.

In the book, Lynch recounted his improbable life story. Born into slavery on a plantation in Louisiana, he was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and moved to Natchez, Miss., where he received an informal education by overhearing the lessons from a local White school across the alley from his job at a photography store. In 1870, at the age of 22, he joined Mississippi’s first integrated legislature, helping ratify the 14th and 15th amendments, which guaranteed equal citizenship to formerly enslaved people and voting rights to Black men.

In 1873, the 24-year-old Lynch became speaker of the Mississippi House, the first Black man to hold that position in any state. A year later, he made history again, becoming the first Black member of the U.S. House from Mississippi. He helped pass the last of Congress’s major civil rights bills during Reconstruction, banning discrimination in hotels, on trains and in all public accommodations.

It was the high-water mark of Black political power in the state. African Americans comprised more than 40 percent of the legislature and held the offices of lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and secretary of education. As Black influence grew in the majority-Black state, outnumbered White residents resorted to increasingly extreme tactics to regain power. In 1875, segregationists took back the state by force, forming militia groups that attacked integrated political meetings and kept Black voters from the polls. Lynch lost his seat in Congress a year later, when Democratic election officials invalidated nearly 5,000 votes cast for him.

Then came the revisionism. The histories of the era written by Lynch’s White contemporaries described the period as a tragic farce, not because multiracial democracy had been overturned so violently and abruptly, but because it had been attempted at all. Black Southerners were portrayed as ignorant and corrupt, undeserving of the benefits of citizenship and easily duped by greedy Northern “carpetbaggers” and conniving Southern “scalawags.”

Lynch wrote “The Facts of Reconstruction,” after leaving Mississippi and settling in Chicago, to counteract this weaponization of history. “Very much, of course, has been written and published about Reconstruction, but most of it is superficial and unreliable; and, besides, nearly all of it has been written in such a style and tone as to make the alleged facts related harmonize with what was believed to be demanded by public sentiment,” he wrote. His goal was “to present the other side.”

Today, a debate over the country’s racial history is again raging, as one recent leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination didn’t mention slavery among the causes of the Civil War and another restricted how Black history could be taught . Seventy-four laws have been passed at the state level since 2021 limiting how race, sex and gender are taught in schools, a Washington Post investigation found.

These kinds of fights date back more than a century, to the critiques of Reconstruction that formed the first serious histories of the era. In the late 1880s, James Ford Rhodes, an Ohio industrialist turned amateur historian, began publishing his highly popular, seven-volume “History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877.” “No large policy in our country,” he wrote, “has ever been so conspicuous a failure as that of forcing universal negro suffrage upon the South.” He referred to Reconstruction as the “oppression of the South by the North.”

Lynch critiqued Rhodes’s work in a series of articles in the Journal of Negro History in 1917 and 1918, following publication of “The Facts of Reconstruction.” “I regret to say that, so far as the Reconstruction period is concerned, it is not only inaccurate and unreliable but it is the most biased, partisan, and prejudiced historical work I have ever read,” he wrote.

Lynch drew on his own experiences to defend Reconstruction. In addition to passing landmark civil rights laws, the integrated Mississippi legislature built new roads, hospitals and schools while instituting landmark reforms such as the first system of public education. The state governments under Reconstruction “were the best governments those States ever had before or have ever had since,” Lynch argued, because “they were the first and only governments in that section that were based upon the consent of the governed.”

But Lynch’s defense of Reconstruction was overshadowed by the writings of White historians hostile to Black suffrage, led by Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning and his influential PhD students, many of whom traveled from the South to study with him. They were the first generation of professional historians who produced seminal works on Reconstruction and detailed studies of each Southern state that defined how the era was understood for decades. The Dunning school provided “an intellectual foundation for Jim Crow,” the Columbia University historian Eric Foner wrote.

This rewriting of history propelled the Lost Cause movement, led by Confederate veterans and their families, which promoted reconciliation efforts with the North by portraying the Civil War not as a fight to maintain slavery, but as a noble struggle to preserve the Southern way of life. As Reconstruction laws were wiped from the books, monuments were erected to Confederate generals throughout the South, the works of Rhodes and Dunning circulated widely, and the ultra-racist 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” was a smash hit, becoming the first film shown at the White House and reviving the Ku Klux Klan.

“The Southern victory over Reconstruction replaced Union victory in the war and Jim Crow laws replaced the Fourteenth Amendment in their places of honor in national memory,” David Blight wrote in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.”

Lynch and his effort to preserve an accurate version of the history of Reconstruction have been largely forgotten. But as the country once again argues over its racial past, his work is arguably more important than ever.

Ari Berman is Mother Jones’ national voting rights correspondent and the author of the new book “ Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It. ”

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Ava DuVernay.

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DuVernay on exploring racism, antisemitism, caste in ‘Origin’

Despite horrors, film ‘a collection of love stories’

Harvard Correspondent

In a talk at the Kennedy School Wednesday, award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter Ava DuVernay said the impetus for her latest film, “Origin” — an adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” — wasn’t racism, antisemitism, or caste.

“I have to be motivated by human emotions,” said the “Selma” and “13th” director, explaining her decision to make the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilkerson the protagonist of the film.

“I went in thinking, ‘I’m going to write a story about a woman writing a book,’” DuVernay said. Centering Wilkerson allowed her to explore “the interiority of the character. To write a movie about a woman on a journey.”

In “Caste,” Wilkerson explores underlying systems of social hierarchy, exploring connections between American racism, the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, and the subjugation of Dalits in India.

DuVernay said that after a second reading, she realized that Wilkerson was an obvious protagonist. This was partly because the author had shared on social media about the recent deaths of her parents and her husband.

“I don’t see my work as being about trauma. I see all my work as being about triumph, and you cannot triumph if you do not know what you are overcoming.” Ava DuVernay

“I realized those losses happened when she was writing ‘Caste,’” DuVernay recalled. “She’s traveling the world. Her losses — and what she’s finding and gaining — all of those collide and all of those make their way into the book somehow.”

In some ways, DuVernay said, Wilkerson’s journey paralleled her own. In 2020, when “Caste” came out, DuVernay had recently lost a close family member. In addition, due to the pandemic, she recalled “everyone [feeling] afraid.” Soon after, the murder of George Floyd added to the “heightened emotions” of the day.

Wilkerson’s personal story “ignited” the historical information for DuVernay. “Origin” juxtaposes the contemporary story of Wilkerson and her book’s historical material, which “spans 400 years and seven different time periods.”

DuVernay said depicting the experience of the Dalits, the caste in India relegated to the lowest and most degrading work, was uncomfortable. She felt that as a non-Dalit, “I shouldn’t be doing it.” While she felt obligated to include such a major part of the book in her film, the experiences didn’t feel like hers to tell. In fact, for the filmmaker, it harkened back to another era — and another kind of injustice. “I likened it to well-meaning white people depicting African American life when Black people were not allowed to make films or given access to filmmaking,” she said. Without representation in the process, she concluded, “there’s usually a little something missing.”

DuVernay was joined on stage for the talk by Khalil Gibran Muhammad , Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School.

“You’ve been making films about systemic racism for a long time, so what convinced you in the story of ‘Caste’ that Isabel Wilkerson had gotten it right?” asked Muhammad. “That somehow our language wasn’t quite right to capture … And I have a line here from the film, ‘Racism as the primary language to describe everything is insufficient.’ So talk us through your adaptation of this thesis.”

“I don’t say that she got it right,” DuVernay responded. “I think that her pursuit of her idea is fascinating.”

Describing the two years she spent interviewing Wilkerson, DuVernay explained her nuanced take.

“There are commonalities and there is an entry point that is shared across oppressions,” she said. “We don’t have to compete in the ‘oppression Olympics’ to see who is suffering more. This very simple idea of hierarchy of human beings based on a random set of traits is at the core of all of the -isms,” she concluded, naming racism and antisemitism along with Islamophobia and homophobia.

Despite the horrors in “Origin,” DuVernay said she sees her film as “a collection of love stories.”

“I don’t see my work as being about trauma. I see all my work as being about triumph, and you cannot triumph if you do not know what you are overcoming.”

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