Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World is a novel written by English author Frances Burney and first published in 1778. Although published anonymously, its authorship was revealed by the poet George Huddesford in what Burney called a "vile poem".
96-457: In this 3-volume epistolary novel , title character Evelina is the unacknowledged but legitimate daughter of a dissipated English aristocrat , and thus raised in rural seclusion until her 17th year. Through a series of humorous events that take place in London and the resort town of Hotwells , near Bristol , Evelina learns to navigate the complex layers of 18th-century English society and come under
192-401: A convent correspond over a 17-year period, exchanging letters describing their lives. Mary Shelley employs the epistolary form in her novel Frankenstein (1818). Shelley uses the letters as one of a variety of framing devices, as the story is presented through the letters of a sea captain and scientific explorer attempting to reach the north pole who encounters Victor Frankenstein and records
288-520: A fate similar to that of her mother Caroline, who secretly wedded Sir John Belmont, a libertine, who afterwards denied the marriage. To keep Evelina from Mme Duval, the Reverend lets her visit Howard Grove, Lady Howard's home, on an extended holiday. While she is there, the family learns that Lady Howard's son-in-law, naval officer Captain Mirvan, is returning to England after a seven-year absence. Desperate to join
384-411: A form of entertainment. However, one of the earliest English novels, Daniel Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe (1719), has elements of the romance, unlike these novels, because of its exotic setting and story of survival in isolation. Crusoe lacks almost all of the elements found in these new novels: wit, a fast narration evolving around a group of young fashionable urban heroes, along with their intrigues,
480-542: A genre became popular in the 18th century in the works of such authors as Samuel Richardson , with his immensely successful novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1749). John Cleland 's early erotic novel Fanny Hill (1748) is written as a series of letters from the titular character to an unnamed recipient. In France, there was Lettres persanes (1721) by Montesquieu , followed by Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau , and Choderlos de Laclos ' Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), which used
576-464: A hero and his life. The adventures led to satirical encounters with the real world with the hero either becoming the pitiable victim or the rogue who exploited the vices of those he met. A second tradition of satirical romances can be traced back to Heinrich Wittenwiler 's Ring ( c. 1410 ) and to François Rabelais ' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), which parodied and satirized heroic romances, and did this mostly by dragging them into
672-454: A large number of inserted letters already dominated the narrative. Other well-known examples of early epistolary novels are closely related to the tradition of letter-books and miscellanies of letters. Within the successive editions of Edmé Boursault 's Letters of Respect, Gratitude and Love ( Lettres de respect, d'obligation et d'amour ) (1669), a group of letters written to a girl named Babet were expanded and became more and more distinct from
768-561: A nostalgia for the old romances with their heroism and professed virtue. Jane Barker explicitly advertised her Exilius as "A new Romance", "written after the Manner of Telemachus", in 1715. Robinson Crusoe spoke of his own story as a "romance", though in the preface to the third volume, published in 1720, Defoe attacks all who said "that [...] the Story is feign'd, that the Names are borrow'd, and that it
864-618: A pen and scribbling her diary entries under the most dramatic and unlikely of circumstances. Oliver Goldsmith used the form to satirical effect in The Citizen of the World , subtitled "Letters from a Chinese Philosopher Residing in London to his Friends in the East" (1760–61). So did the diarist Fanny Burney in a successful comic first novel, Evelina (1788). The epistolary novel slowly became less popular after 18th century. Although Jane Austen tried
960-446: A philosophical and a theological novel, respectively. The tradition of works of fiction that were also philosophical texts continued with Thomas More 's Utopia (1516) and Tommaso Campanella 's City of the Sun (1602). However, the actual tradition of the philosophical novel came into being in the 1740s with new editions of More's work under the title Utopia: or the happy republic;
1056-624: A philosophical romance (1743). Voltaire wrote in this genre in Micromegas: a comic romance, which is a biting satire on philosophy, ignorance, and the self-conceit of mankind (1752, English 1753). His Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759) became central texts of the French Enlightenment and of the modern novel. An example of the experimental novel is Laurence Sterne 's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), with its rejection of continuous narration. In it
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#17328519029911152-406: A point in a conversation, and the exemplum a priest would insert in a sermon belong into this tradition. Written collections of such stories circulated in a wide range of products from practical compilations of examples designed for the use of clerics to compilations of various stories such as Boccaccio 's Decameron (1354) and Geoffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales (1386–1400). The Decameron
1248-499: A polyphonic one. The epistolary novel form has continued to be used after the eighteenth century. Novel A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book . The English word to describe such a work derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story (of something new)", itself from the Latin: novella ,
1344-560: A pseudo- bucolic form, and the celebrated L'Astrée , (1610) of Honore d'Urfe (1568–1625), which is the earliest French novel, is properly styled a pastoral . Although its action was, in the main, languid and sentimental, there was a side of the Astree which encouraged that extravagant love of glory, that spirit of " panache", which was now rising to its height in France. That spirit it was which animated Marin le Roy de Gomberville (1603–1674), who
1440-698: A real detective for whom Doyle only acted as a literary agent . Epistolary novels can be categorized based on the number of people whose letters are included. This gives three types of epistolary novels: monophonic (giving the letters of only one character, like Letters of a Portuguese Nun and The Sorrows of Young Werther ), dialogic (giving the letters of two characters, like Mme Marie Jeanne Riccoboni 's Letters of Fanni Butler (1757), and polyphonic (with three or more letter-writing characters, such as in Bram Stoker's Dracula ). A crucial element in polyphonic epistolary novels like Clarissa and Dangerous Liaisons
1536-537: A realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also novels, including Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein , J. R. R. Tolkien 's The Lord of the Rings , and Harper Lee 's To Kill a Mockingbird . Murasaki Shikibu 's Tale of Genji , an early 11th-century Japanese text, has sometimes been described as
1632-461: A rising literacy rate among the growing population of townspeople, as well as the development of lending libraries. Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) might be said to have given birth to the modern consciousness of the novel in Japan, mixing vernacular dialogue into his humorous and cautionary tales of the pleasure quarters, the so-called Ukiyozōshi (" floating world ") genre. Ihara 's Life of an Amorous Man
1728-508: A scandalous moral, gallant talk to be imitated, and a brief, concise plot. The new developments did, however, lead to Eliza Haywood 's epic length novel, Love in Excess (1719/20) and to Samuel Richardson 's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741). Some literary historians date the beginning of the English novel with Richardson's Pamela , rather than Crusoe. The idea of the "rise of the novel" in
1824-483: A separate key. The Mercure Gallant set the fashion in the 1670s. Collections of letters and memoirs appeared, and were filled with the intriguing new subject matter and the epistolary novel grew from this and led to the first full blown example of scandalous fiction in Aphra Behn 's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684/ 1685/ 1687). Before the rise of the literary novel, reading novels had only been
1920-672: A single sheet folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages. They were often illustrated with crude woodcuts , which sometimes bore no relation to the text. When illustrations were included in chapbooks, they were considered popular prints . The tradition arose in the 16th century, as soon as printed books became affordable, and rose to its height during the 17th and 18th centuries. Many different kinds of ephemera and popular or folk literature were published as chapbooks, such as almanacs , children's literature , folk tales , nursery rhymes , pamphlets , poetry , and political and religious tracts . The term "chapbook" for this type of literature
2016-533: A singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus , diminutive of novus , meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody , the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel , Medieval Chivalric romance , and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella . The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism , in
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#17328519029912112-430: A young lady who is his supposed daughter (who, unbeknownst to him is actually illegitimate), and therefore assumes Mme Duval to be trying to dupe him for his money. Mme Duval is furious and threatens to rush Evelina back to Paris to pursue the lawsuit. A second compromise sees Evelina return to London with her grandmother, where she is forced to spend time with her ill-bred Branghton cousins and their rowdy friends, but she
2208-499: Is Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen , published in 1668, Late 17th-century critics looked back on the history of prose fiction, proud of the generic shift that had taken place, leading towards the modern novel/novella. The first perfect works in French were those of Scarron and Madame de La Fayette 's "Spanish history" Zayde (1670). The development finally led to her Princesse de Clèves (1678),
2304-857: Is a long, fictional narrative. The novel in the modern era usually makes use of a literary prose style . The development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in printing , and the introduction of cheap paper in the 15th century. Several characteristics of a novel might include: East Asian countries, like China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan, use the word 小說 ( variant Traditional Chinese and Shinjitai : 小説 ; Simplified Chinese : 小说 ; Hangeul : 소설 ; Pinyin : xiǎoshuō ; Jyutping : siu syut ; Wugniu : siau-seq 7 ; Peh-oe-ji : sió-soat ; Hepburn : shōsetsu ; Revised : soseol ; Vietnamese : tiểu thuyết ), which literally means "small talks", to refer to works of fiction of whatever length. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures,
2400-690: Is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love . Originally, romance literature was written in Old French , Anglo-Norman and Occitan , later, in English , Italian and German . During the early 13th century, romances were increasingly written as prose. The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century; for example, the Romance of Flamenca . The Prose Lancelot or Vulgate Cycle also includes passages from that period. This collection indirectly led to Thomas Malory 's Le Morte d'Arthur of
2496-473: Is a type of narrative in prose or verse popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe . They were marvel-filled adventures , often of a knight-errant with heroic qualities, who undertakes a quest , yet it is "the emphasis on heterosexual love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the chanson de geste and other kinds of epic , which involve heroism." In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there
2592-444: Is able to reveal the second Miss Belmont's parentage. She identifies Polly Green, Evelina's former wet nurse, mother of a girl 6 weeks older than Evelina, as the perpetrator of the fraud. Polly has been passing her own daughter off as that of Sir John and Caroline for the past 18 years, hoping to secure a better future for her. Ultimately, Lord Orville suggests that the unfortunate girl be named co-heiress with Evelina; kindhearted Evelina
2688-540: Is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place". The late 18th century brought an answer with the Romantic Movement's readiness to reclaim the word romance, with the gothic romance , and the historical novels of Walter Scott . Robinson Crusoe now became a "novel" in this period, that is a work of the new realistic fiction created in the 18th century. Sentimental novels relied on emotional responses, and feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and
2784-516: Is completely out of reach. The Mirvans finally return to the country, taking Evelina and Mme Duval with them. Spurred by Evelina's greedy cousins, Mme Duval concocts a plan to sue Sir John Belmont, Evelina's father, and force him to recognize his daughter's claim to his estate in court. Reverend Villars is displeased, and they decide against a lawsuit, but Lady Howard still writes to Sir John Belmont, who responds unfavourably. He does not believe it possible for Evelina to be his daughter, as he already has
2880-569: Is considered by some to be one of the earliest "romances" or "novels" of China, and it was influential on later works of fiction in East Asia. Urbanization and the spread of printed books in Song dynasty (960–1279) led China to the evolution of oral storytelling, chuanqi and huaben , into long-form multi-volume vernacular fictional novels by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The European developments of
2976-469: Is considered the first work in this genre. Although Ihara's works were not regarded as high literature at the time because it had been aimed towards and popularized by the chōnin (merchant classes), they became popular and were key to the development and spread of ukiyozōshi . A chapbook is an early type of popular literature printed in early modern Europe . Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered booklets, usually printed on
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3072-456: Is delighted. Finally, Sir Clement Willoughby writes to Evelina, confessing that he had written the insulting letter (she had already suspected this), hoping to separate Evelina and Lord Orville. In Paris, Mr. Macartney is reunited with the false Miss Belmont, his former beloved: separated by Sir John, at first because Macartney was too poor and lowly to marry his purported daughter, and then because his affair with Macartney's mother would have made
3168-569: Is derived from Latin from the Greek word epistolē ( ἐπιστολή ), meaning a letter (see epistle ) . This type of fiction is also sometimes known by the German term Briefroman or more generally as epistolary fiction . The epistolary form can be seen as adding greater realism to a story, due to the text existing diegetically within the lives of the characters. It is in particular able to demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to
3264-443: Is distracted by Mr. Macartney, a melancholy and direly-poor Scottish poet. Finding him with a pair of pistols, she supposed him to be considering suicide and bids him to look to his salvation; later he informs her that he has been contemplating not only self-destruction but more-so highway robbery. He is in dreadful financial straits, is engaged in tracing his own obscure parentage, as well as recovering from his mother's sudden death and
3360-424: Is stunned when he seeks her out in London's unfashionable section and seems interested in renewing their acquaintance. When an insulting and brash letter supposedly from Lord Orville devastates her and makes her believe she misperceived him, she returns home to Berry Hill and falls ill. Slowly recuperating from her illness, Evelina agrees to accompany her neighbour, a sarcastically tempered widow named Mrs. Selwyn, to
3456-441: Is the dramatic device of 'discrepant awareness': the simultaneous but separate correspondences of the heroines and the villains creating dramatic tension. They can also be classified according to their type and quantity of use of non-letter documents, though this has obvious correlations with the number of voices – for example, newspaper clippings are unlikely to feature heavily in a monophonic epistolary and considerably more likely in
3552-479: The Roman à clef . Other works could, conversely, claim to be factual histories, yet earn the suspicion that they were wholly invented. A further differentiation was made between private and public history: Daniel Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe was, within this pattern, neither a "romance" nor a "novel". It smelled of romance, yet the preface stated that it should most certainly be read as a true private history. The rise of
3648-469: The historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel . Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne , Herman Melville , Ann Radcliffe , and John Cowper Powys , preferred the term " romance ". Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel , which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays
3744-425: The "belongs to the commoners", "trivial daily talks" aspect in one of his work. 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 (mid 1st century), which is "arguably the earliest surviving Western novel", as well as Petronius ' Satyricon , Lucian 's True Story , Apuleius ' The Golden Ass , and
3840-410: The 16th and 17th centuries two factors led to the separation of history and fiction. The invention of printing immediately created a new market of comparatively cheap entertainment and knowledge in the form of chapbooks . The more elegant production of this genre by 17th- and 18th-century authors were belles lettres — that is, a market that would be neither low nor academic. The second major development
3936-449: The 18th century is especially associated with Ian Watt 's influential study The Rise of the Novel (1957). In Watt's conception, a rise in fictional realism during the 18th century came to distinguish the novel from earlier prose narratives. The rising status of the novel in eighteenth century can be seen in the development of philosophical and experimental novels . Philosophical fiction
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4032-484: The 21st century. The novel shows the genre's results of changing perspectives: individual points were presented by the individual characters, and the central voice of the author and moral evaluation disappeared (at least in the first volume; further volumes introduced a narrator). The author furthermore explored a realm of intrigue with complex scenarios such as letters that fall into the wrong hands, faked letters, or letters withheld by protagonists. The epistolary novel as
4128-447: The 5th through 8th centuries. Vasavadatta by Subandhu , Daśakumāracarita and Avantisundarīkathā by Daṇḍin , and Kadambari by Banabhatta are among notable works. These narrative forms were influenced by much older classical Sanskrit plays and Indian classical drama literature, as well as by oral traditions and religious texts. The 7th-century Tang dynasty narrative prose work You Xian Ku written by Zhang Zhuo
4224-511: The Fatalist (1773, printed posthumously in 1796). A market of literature in the modern sense of the word, that is a separate market for fiction and poetry, did not exist until the late seventeenth century. All books were sold under the rubric of "History and politicks" in the early 18th century, including pamphlets , memoirs , travel literature , political analysis, serious histories, romances, poetry, and novels. That fictional histories shared
4320-531: The Mirvans on their trip to London, Evelina entreats her guardian to let her attend with them, promising that the visit will last only a few weeks. Villars reluctantly consents. In London, Evelina's beauty and ambiguous social status attract unwanted attention and unkind speculation. Ignorant of the conventions and behaviours of 18th-century London society, she makes a series of humiliating (but humorous) faux pas that further expose her to social ridicule. She soon earns
4416-586: The Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes", which focuses on a potential victim, a heroine that has all the modern virtues and who is vulnerable because her low social status and her occupation as servant of a libertine who falls in love with her. She, however, ends in reforming her antagonist. Male heroes adopted the new sentimental character traits in the 1760s. Laurence Sterne 's Yorick ,
4512-667: The Reverend Arthur Villars, in which she reports that Madame (Mme) Duval, the grandmother of Villars' ward , Evelina Anville, intends to visit England to renew her acquaintance with her granddaughter Evelina. Eighteen years earlier, Mme Duval had broken off her relationship with her daughter Caroline, Evelina's mother, but never knew of the birth or even existence of Evelina until Evelina was in her late teens. Upon this discovery, Mme Duval desires to reclaim Evelina and whisk her away to France as her closest blood relation. Reverend Villars fears Mme Duval's influence could lead Evelina to
4608-615: The ancient definition of "small talks" merely refers to trivial affairs, trivial facts, and can be different from the Western concept of novel. According to Lu Xun , the word "small talks" first appeared in the works of Zhuang Zhou , which coined such word. Later scholars also provided a similar definition, such as Han dynasty historian Ban Gu , who categorized all the trivial stories and gossips collected by local government magistrates as "small talks". Hồ Nguyên Trừng classified his memoir collection Nam Ông mộng lục as "small talks" clearly with
4704-535: The anonymous Aesop Romance and Alexander Romance . These works were often influenced by oral traditions, such as storytelling and myth-making, and reflected the cultural, social, and political contexts of their time. Afterwards, their style was adapted in later Byzantine novels such as Hysimine and Hysimines by Eustathios Makrembolites Narrative forms were also developed in Classical Sanskrit in India during
4800-479: The attentions of two gentlemen: Lord Orville, a handsome and extremely eligible peer and pattern-card of modest, becoming behaviour; and Sir Clement Willoughby, a baronet with duplicitous intentions. Evelina's untimely reunion in London with her grandmother and the Branghtons, her long-unknown extended family, along with the embarrassment their boorish, social-climbing antics cause, soon convince Evelina that Lord Orville
4896-546: The author not only addresses readers in his preface but speaks directly to them in his fictional narrative. In addition to Sterne's narrative experiments, there are visual experiments, such as a marbled page, a black page to express sorrow, and a page of lines to show the plot lines of the book. The novel as a whole focuses on the problems of language, with constant regard to John Locke 's theories in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . The rise of
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#17328519029914992-462: The cities as traders. Cheap printed histories were, in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially popular among apprentices and younger urban readers of both sexes. The early modern market, from the 1530s and 1540s, divided into low chapbooks and high market expensive, fashionable, elegant belles lettres . The Amadis and Rabelais ' Gargantua and Pantagruel were important publications with respect to this divide. Both books specifically addressed
5088-701: The concept of novel as it is understood in the Western world was (and still is) termed as "long length small talk" (長篇小說), novella as "medium length small talk" (中篇小說), and short stories as "short length small talk" (短篇小說). However, in Vietnamese culture, the term 小說 exclusively refers to 長篇小說 (long-length small talk), i.e. standard novel, while different terms are used to refer to novella and short stories. Such terms originated from ancient Chinese classification of literature works into "small talks" (tales of daily life and trivial matters) and "great talks" ("sacred" classic works of great thinkers like Confucius ). In other words,
5184-406: The device of an omniscient narrator . An important strategic device in the epistolary novel for creating the impression of authenticity of the letters is the fictional editor. There are two theories on the genesis of the epistolary novel: The first claims that the genre is originated from novels with inserted letters, in which the portion containing the third-person narrative in between the letters
5280-491: The discovery that his beloved is actually his sister. Evelina charitably gives him her purse. Otherwise, her time with the Branghtons is uniformly mortifying: during her visit to the Marylebone pleasure garden, for instance, she is attacked by a drunken sailor and accosted by several rowdy men before being rescued by prostitutes—and in this humiliating company, she meets Lord Orville again. Sure that he can never respect her now, she
5376-429: The dying man's narrative and confessions. Published in 1848, Anne Brontë 's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is framed as a retrospective letter from one of the main heroes to his friend and brother-in-law with the diary of the eponymous tenant inside it. In the late 19th century, Bram Stoker released one of the most widely recognized and successful novels in the epistolary form to date, Dracula . Printed in 1897,
5472-553: The early 1470s. Prose became increasingly attractive because it enabled writers to associate popular stories with serious histories traditionally composed in prose, and could also be more easily translated. Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic , satiric or burlesque intent. Romances reworked legends , fairy tales , and history, but by about 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in Don Quixote (1605). Still,
5568-404: The epistolary form to great dramatic effect, because the sequence of events was not always related directly or explicitly. In Germany, there was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 's The Sorrows of Young Werther ( Die Leiden des jungen Werther ) (1774) and Friedrich Hölderlin 's Hyperion . The first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769) by Frances Brooke , and twenty years later
5664-614: The epistolary in juvenile writings and her novella Lady Susan (1794), she abandoned this structure for her later work. It is thought that her lost novel First Impressions , which was redrafted to become Pride and Prejudice , may have been epistolary: Pride and Prejudice contains an unusual number of letters quoted in full and some play a critical role in the plot. The epistolary form nonetheless saw continued use, surviving in exceptions or in fragments in nineteenth-century novels. In Honoré de Balzac 's novel Letters of Two Brides , two women who became friends during their education at
5760-471: The epistolary novel in English is said by many to be James Howell (1594–1666) with "Familiar Letters" (1645–50), who writes of prison, foreign adventure, and the love of women. Perhaps first work to fully utilize the potential of an epistolary novel was Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister . This work was published anonymously in three volumes (1684, 1685, and 1687), and has been attributed to Aphra Behn though its authorship remains disputed in
5856-460: The eye of a distinguished nobleman with whom a romantic relationship is formed in the latter part of the novel. This sentimental novel , which has notions of sensibility and early romanticism , satirizes the society in which it is set and is a significant precursor to the work of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth , whose novels explore many of the same issues. The novel opens with a distressed letter from Lady Howard to her longtime acquaintance,
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#17328519029915952-454: The fictional characters of a narrative. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered to include novels composed of documents even if they do not include letters at all. More recently, epistolaries may include electronic documents such as recordings and radio, blog posts, and e-mails . The word epistolary
6048-409: The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown , were both written in epistolary form. Starting in the 18th century, the epistolary form was subject to much ridicule, resulting in a number of savage burlesques . The most notable example of these was Henry Fielding 's Shamela (1741), written as a parody of Pamela . In it, the female narrator can be found wielding
6144-470: The first novel with what would become characteristic French subject matter. Europe witnessed the generic shift in the titles of works in French published in Holland, which supplied the international market and English publishers exploited the novel/romance controversy in the 1670s and 1680s. Contemporary critics listed the advantages of the new genre: brevity, a lack of ambition to produce epic poetry in prose;
6240-575: The hero of the Sentimental Journey (1768) did so with an enormous amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith 's Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Henry Mackenzie 's Man of Feeling (1771) produced the far more serious role models. These works inspired a sub - and counterculture of pornographic novels, for which Greek and Latin authors in translations had provided elegant models from the last century. Pornography includes John Cleland 's Fanny Hill (1748), which offered an almost exact reversal of
6336-598: The heroes, it was always hinted that they were well-known public characters of the day in a romantic disguise. Stories of witty cheats were an integral part of the European novella with its tradition of fabliaux . Significant examples include Till Eulenspiegel (1510), Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Grimmelshausen 's Simplicissimus Teutsch (1666–1668) and in England Richard Head 's The English Rogue (1665). The tradition that developed with these titles focused on
6432-430: The latter's inappropriate attentions to Evelina. Lord Orville proposes, much to Evelina's delight. However, Evelina is distraught at the continuing gulf between herself and her father and the mystery surrounding his false daughter. Finally, Mrs. Selwyn is able to secure a surprise meeting with Sir John. When he sees Evelina, he is horrified and guilt-stricken because she clearly resembles her mother, Caroline. This means that
6528-532: The low realm of the burlesque. Don Quixote modified the satire of romances: its hero lost contact with reality by reading too many romances in the Amadisian tradition. Other important works of the tradition are Paul Scarron 's Roman Comique (1651–57), the anonymous French Rozelli with its satire on Europe's religions, Alain-René Lesage 's Gil Blas (1715–1735), Henry Fielding 's Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), and Denis Diderot 's Jacques
6624-420: The meaning of "trivial facts" rather than the Western definition of novel. Such classification also left a strong legacy in several East Asian interpretations of the Western definition of “novel” at the time when Western literature was first introduced to East Asian countries. For example, Thanh Lãng and Nhất Linh classified the epic poems such as The Tale of Kiều as "novel", while Trần Chánh Chiếu emphasized
6720-417: The modern image of the medieval is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the word "medieval" evokes knights, distressed damsels, dragons, and such tropes. The term "novel" originates from the production of short stories, or novella that remained part of a European oral culture of storytelling into the late 19th century. Fairy tales, jokes, and humorous stories designed to make
6816-399: The modern novel as an alternative to the chivalric romance began with the publication of Miguel de Cervantes ' novel Don Quixote : "the first great novel of world literature". It continued with Scarron 's Roman Comique (the first part of which appeared in 1651), whose heroes noted the rivalry between French romances and the new Spanish genre. In Germany an early example of the novel
6912-427: The modern novel was born in the early 18th century. Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes audio books , web novels , and ebooks . Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in graphic novels . While these comic book versions of works of fiction have their origins in the 19th century, they have only become popular recently. A novel
7008-501: The new customers of popular histories, rather than readers of belles lettres . The Amadis was a multi–volume fictional history of style, that aroused a debate about style and elegance as it became the first best-seller of popular fiction. On the other hand, Gargantua and Pantagruel , while it adopted the form of modern popular history, in fact satirized that genre's stylistic achievements. The division, between low and high literature, became especially visible with books that appeared on both
7104-469: The novel did not occur until after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439, and the rise of the publishing industry over a century later. Long European works continued to be in poetry in the 16th century. The modern European novel is often said to have begun with Don Quixote in 1605. Another important early novel was the French pastoral novel L'Astrée by Honore d'Urfe , published in 1610. Romance or chivalric romance
7200-462: The novel is compiled entirely of letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, doctor's notes, ship's logs, and the like. The biographic stylings of the Sherlock Holmes adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle have lead to the tradition of a " Sherlockian game " among the Sherlock Holmes fandom , where fans discuss the supposed writings of Dr. Watson as though they were a genuine account of
7296-419: The other Miss Belmont (the false daughter) is recognized as a fraud. Evelina is able to ease his guilt with her repeated gentle pardons and the delivery of a letter written by her mother on her deathbed in which she forgives Sir John for his behaviour if he will remove her ignominy (by acknowledging their marriage) and acknowledge Evelina as his legitimate daughter. Mrs Clifton, Berry Hill's longtime housekeeper,
7392-447: The other letters, until it formed a small epistolary novel entitled Letters to Babet ( Lettres à Babet ). The immensely famous Letters of a Portuguese Nun ( Lettres portugaises ) (1669) generally attributed to Gabriel-Joseph de La Vergne, comte de Guilleragues , though a small minority still regard Marianna Alcoforado as the author, is claimed to be intended to be part of a miscellany of Guilleragues prose and poetry. The founder of
7488-453: The plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action. The result is a valorization of "fine feeling", displaying the characters as models of refined, sensitive emotional affect. The ability to display such feelings was thought at this time to show character and experience, and to help shape positive social life and relationships. An example of this genre is Samuel Richardson 's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), composed "to cultivate
7584-467: The plot of novels that emphasise virtue. The prostitute Fanny Hill learns to enjoy her work and establishes herself as a free and economically independent individual, in editions one could only expect to buy under the counter. Less virtuous protagonists can also be found in satirical novels, like Richard Head 's English Rogue (1665), that feature brothels, while women authors like Aphra Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of
7680-427: The popular and belles lettres markets in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries: low chapbooks included abridgments of books such as Don Quixote . The term "chapbook" is also in use for present-day publications, commonly short, inexpensive booklets. Heroic Romance is a genre of imaginative literature, which flourished in the 17th century, principally in France. The beginnings of modern fiction in France took
7776-562: The publication of histories that dared not risk an unambiguous assertion of their truth. The literary market-place of the late 17th and early 18th century employed a simple pattern of options whereby fictions could reach out into the sphere of true histories. This permitted its authors to claim they had published fiction, not truth, if they ever faced allegations of libel. Prefaces and title pages of seventeenth and early eighteenth century fiction acknowledged this pattern: histories could claim to be romances, but threaten to relate true events, as in
7872-498: The resort town of Clifton Heights, where she unwillingly attracts the attention of womanizer Lord Merton, on the eve of his marriage to Lord Orville's sister, Lady Louisa Larpent. Aware of Lord Orville's arrival, Evelina tries to distance herself from him because of his impertinent letter, but his gentle manners work their spell until she is torn between attraction to him and belief in his past duplicity. The unexpected appearance of Mr. Macartney reveals an unexpected streak of jealousy in
7968-473: The same space with academic histories and modern journalism had been criticized by historians since the end of the Middle Ages: fictions were "lies" and therefore hardly justifiable at all. The climate, however, changed in the 1670s. The romance format of the quasi–historical works of Madame d'Aulnoy , César Vichard de Saint-Réal , Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras , and Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer , allowed
8064-601: The seemingly imperturbable Lord Orville. Convinced that Macartney is a rival for Evelina's affections, Lord Orville withdraws. However, Macartney has intended only to repay his financial debt to Evelina. Lord Orville's genuine affection for Evelina and her assurances that she and Macartney are not involved finally win out over Orville's jealousy, and he secures a meeting between Evelina and Macartney. It appears that all doubts have been resolved between Lord Orville and Evelina, especially when Mrs. Selwyn informs her that she overheard Lord Orville arguing with Sir Clement Willoughby about
8160-414: The style was fresh and plain; the focus was on modern life, and on heroes who were neither good nor bad. The novel's potential to become the medium of urban gossip and scandal fueled the rise of the novel/novella. Stories were offered as allegedly true recent histories, not for the sake of scandal but strictly for the moral lessons they gave. To prove this, fictionalized names were used with the true names in
8256-414: The sweethearts brother and sister, they are now able to marry because Miss "Belmont"'s true parentage has been revealed and the two are not related at all. They are married in a joint ceremony alongside Evelina and Lord Orville, who decide to visit Reverend Villars at Berry Hill for their honeymoon trip. Epistolary novel An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters between
8352-491: The word "novel" at the cost of its rival, the romance, remained a Spanish and English phenomenon, and though readers all over Western Europe had welcomed the novel(la) or short history as an alternative in the second half of the 17th century, only the English and the Spanish had openly discredited the romance. But the change of taste was brief and Fénelon's Telemachus [ Les Aventures de Télémaque ] (1699/1700) already exploited
8448-468: The world's first novel, because of its early use of the experience of intimacy in a narrative form. There is considerable debate over this, however, as there were certainly long fictional prose works that preceded it. The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of the vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe
8544-564: Was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain . Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press . Miguel de Cervantes , author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era . Literary historian Ian Watt , in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that
8640-561: Was a compilation of one hundred novelle told by ten people—seven women and three men—fleeing the Black Death by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills, in 1348. The modern distinction between history and fiction did not exist in the early sixteenth century and the grossest improbabilities pervade many historical accounts found in the early modern print market. William Caxton 's 1485 edition of Thomas Malory 's Le Morte d'Arthur (1471)
8736-461: Was coined in the 19th century. The corresponding French and German terms are bibliothèque bleue (blue book) and Volksbuch , respectively. The principal historical subject matter of chapbooks was abridgements of ancient historians, popular medieval histories of knights, stories of comical heroes, religious legends, and collections of jests and fables. The new printed books reached the households of urban citizens and country merchants who visited
8832-405: Was gradually reduced. The other theory claims that the epistolary novel arose from miscellanies of letters and poetry: some of the letters were tied together into a (mostly amorous) plot. There is evidence to support both claims. The first truly epistolary novel, the Spanish "Prison of Love" ( Cárcel de amor ) ( c. 1485 ) by Diego de San Pedro , belongs to a tradition of novels in which
8928-405: Was not exactly new. Plato 's dialogues were embedded in fictional narratives and his Republic is an early example of a Utopia . Ibn Tufail 's 12th century Philosophus Autodidacticus with its story of a human outcast surviving on an island, and the 13th century response by Ibn al-Nafis , Theologus Autodidactus are both didactic narrative works that can be thought of as early examples of
9024-469: Was sold as a true history, though the story unfolded in a series of magical incidents and historical improbabilities. Sir John Mandeville 's Voyages , written in the 14th century, but circulated in printed editions throughout the 18th century, was filled with natural wonders, which were accepted as fact, like the one-footed Ethiopians who use their extremity as an umbrella against the desert sun. Both works eventually came to be viewed as works of fiction. In
9120-502: Was the first best-seller of modern fiction, the Spanish Amadis de Gaula , by García Montalvo. However, it was not accepted as an example of belles lettres . The Amadis eventually became the archetypical romance, in contrast with the modern novel which began to be developed in the 17th century. Many different genres of literature made their debut during the Edo period in Japan, helped by
9216-460: Was the inventor of what have since been known as the Heroical Romances. In these there was experienced a violent recrudescence of the old medieval elements of romance, the impossible valour devoted to a pursuit of the impossible beauty, but the whole clothed in the language and feeling and atmosphere of the age in which the books were written. In order to give point to the chivalrous actions of
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