The novel: a short history

Prose fiction before the word novel

Scholars do not agree on when the novel began, and the answer depends on what is counted as a novel. Margaret Doody has described the form as having a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years, tracing it to ancient Greek and Roman prose narratives. Chariton's Callirhoe is described in the encyclopedic account as arguably the earliest surviving Western novel. The same account points to Sanskrit prose narratives of the fifth to eighth centuries, to Chinese tales from the Tang dynasty, and to Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, written in Muslim Spain.^[1]

In medieval Europe, chivalric romance moved from verse into prose in the early thirteenth century, and Boccaccio's The Decameron and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales drew on the tradition of the novella. In Japan, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji in the early eleventh century, and the critic Harold Bloom is cited as saying it anticipated Cervantes as the first novelist. That is one critic's view, not a settled consensus. The boundary between novel and romance was itself contested: Hawthorne and Melville, among others, preferred the word romance.^[1]

Cervantes and the early modern period

Cervantes's Don Quixote appeared in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. It is often described as the first significant European novel of the modern era, and the encyclopedia article on the book calls it the first modern novel, citing Harold Bloom in support. The article adds that Cervantes spoofed the chivalric romance through a straightforward retelling of the hero's deeds, and so mocked the chivalric romance helping fiction move beyond that genre's narrow convention.^[1][2]

Other starting points are proposed. Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532 to 1564) belongs to an older satirical tradition that parodied heroic romances, and Doody's long history sets the whole question on a different footing. In seventeenth-century France, Madame de La Fayette published La Princesse de Clèves in 1678, described as the first novel with what would become characteristic French subject matter. The same encyclopedic account describes the separation of history from fiction in this period and the part played by printing and cheap chapbooks in spreading prose narrative.^[1]

Naming practice complicates the picture. The encyclopedic account notes that Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was not initially called a novel, and that writers such as Hawthorne and Melville preferred the word romance. Claims about the first novel are therefore better read as claims about which definition a scholar prefers than as the discovery of a single earliest text. Anyone using a date such as 1605 or 1719 as the beginning of the novel should treat it as one defensible choice among several, and should say which definition is being used.^[1]

The eighteenth-century English novel

Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) argued that the modern novel was born in the early eighteenth century, and it treated Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a founding text. The encyclopedic account adds that Crusoe was not initially called a novel. Some historians instead treat Samuel Richardson's Pamela, dated 1740 in one encyclopedic article and 1741 in another, as the true start of the English novel. Watt's argument is therefore one influential account among several, not the only reading of the evidence.^[1][3]

Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) belong to a satirical strand of the form, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to an experimental one, and the sentimental novels gave priority to feeling. Scholars have also argued over what makes a work a novel at all. Fictionality is a commonly cited criterion, though the same account calls it problematic; length, prose style and intimacy are also debated, and Georg Lukacs linked length to the attempt to encompass the totality of life.^[1]

Realism, modernism and the wider world

In the nineteenth century the novel took on public subjects. The encyclopedic account notes that Tolstoy's War and Peace questioned the facts supplied by historians, that Dickens led his readers into contemporary workhouses, and that George Eliot questioned the role, education and status of women. Earlier, Romanticism had revived the romance through Walter Scott's historical novels and the Gothic novel. In 1884 Henry James, in his essay The Art of Fiction, defined a novel in its broadest sense as a personal impression of life.^[1][4]

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) had a major influence on later novelists by attempting to record inner thoughts in place of an external narrator. The method is called stream of consciousness, a term the account says William James first used in 1890, and it is linked to Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson and William Faulkner. The account also names the Latin American Boom, with Cortazar, Garcia Marquez and Fuentes, and notes that web fiction is especially popular in China. This short history is not complete, and the sources used here do not cover postcolonial or other regional traditions in depth.^[1]