Genre: The Novel

September 26, 2012

What is a novel?
Quintessential modern literary form.
A fiction in prose of a certain length what about fictions in verse?

What is genre?
A category of artistic composition. U
Used to order and categorise texts in order to distinguish both their similarities and
differences.
Literary works= shaped by semantics and conventions. Genre groups works
accordingly.
Earliest literary criticism- genre criticism (Aristotles Poetics) Descriptive
becomes prescriptive.
Genre conventionally begins with Greeks= the epics.
Origins of the novel are ambiguous. Its existence can be traced back to Greece
but the French, English and Spanish have made claims to have invented the
novel.
H/e we can confidently assert that it comes into being in 17
th
/ 18
th
century. Novel=
a new species of writing.
Ian Watt attributes the novel to Defoe and Richardson in The Rise of the Novel.
This has been interrogated and challenged by feminists.
H/e, its roots are clearly ambiguous and arbitrary.

Don Quixote:
Influence on fiction was pervasive and inextricable. (Henry Fielding, Sterne,
Greene, Faulkner, Fitzgerald etc).
DQ- a novel which interrogates and reveals the tensions between reality and
fiction.
Features a metanarrative/ self-conscious narrative, which reveals the paradigm
shift in writing and the development of the novel.
Central premise of DQ= clash between reality and fiction (revealed by the unifying
character, narrator and author of Cervantes.
From the outset DQ is alienated. He lives vicariously through fictional characters
and we live vicariously through him. (The process of reading is exemplified and
magnified through the protagonist).
Moral argument= idealism vs realism. Cervantes implies that it must be held in
balance in order to reach progress and that this kind of heroism is in fact
detrimental (DQ and episode of farmer and boy).
Sancho Panzo + DQ= juxtaposition of delusion and realism. Windmill and DQs
adventures have become proverbial.
Windmill= literally and metaphorically an example of the colliding with modernity.
Tensions and overlap between the real world, marked by time and place, and the
imaginative world of the novel. (inclusion of the author as a character,
interrogation of the implications of reading both fictional and literal).
DQ dramatises the complexities of the genre.