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Short Story

Short story

A short story is a form of short fictional narrative prose. Short stories tend to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Because of their brevity, successful short stories rely on literary devices such as character, plot, theme, language, and insight to a greater extent than long form fiction. Famous modern English-language short stories include The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, "The Dead" by James Joyce, To Build A Fire by Jack London, and A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. Short stories have their origins in the prose anecdote, a swiftly-sketched situation that comes rapidly to its point, with parallels in oral story-telling traditions. With the rise of the comparatively realistic novel, the short story evolved as a miniature, with some of its first perfectly independent examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe.

History

Short stories date back to the oral story-telling traditions which produced such notable tales as Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey. Tales such as these were told in a rhyming, poetic format, with the rhymes acting as a mnemonic tool for people to remember the story. Short sections of these tales focused on individual narratives that could be told at one sitting. The overall arch of the story would only emerge through the telling of multiple sections of the tale. Two ancient forms of short stories which did not exist within a larger narrative format are the fable and the anecdote. Fables, which tend to be folk tales with an explicitly expressed moral, were said by the Greek historian Herodotus to have been invented by a Greek slave named Aesop in the 6th century BCE (although other times and nationalities are also given for Aesop). These ancient fables are known today as Aesop's Fables. The other ancient form of short story, anecdotes, were popular during the years of the Roman Empire. Anecdotes functioned as a sort of parable, a brief realistic narration that embodies a point. Many of the surviving Roman anecdotes were later collected in the Gesta Romanorum in the 13th or 14th century. Anecdotes remained popular in Europe well into the 18th century, when the fictional anecdotal letters of Sir Roger de Coverley were published. In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to transition into written stories in the early 14th century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Both of these books are composed of individual short stories (which range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fictions) set within a larger narrative story (a frame story), although the frame tale device was not adopted by all writers. At the end of the 16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly tragic "novella" of Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation). During the Renaissance, the term novella was used when referring to short stories. The mid 17th century in France saw the development of a refined short novel, the "nouvelle", by such authors as Madame de Lafayette. In the 1690s, traditional Fairy tales began to be published (one of the most famous collections was by Charles Perrault). The appearance of Antoine Galland's first modern translation of the Thousand and One Nights (or "Arabian Nights") (from 1704; another translation appeared in 1710-12) would have an enormous influence on the 18th century European short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and others.

Modern short stories

Modern short stories emerged as their own genre in the early 19th century. Early examples of short story collections include the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (1824-1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales (1842), Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1836), and Guy de Maupassant's La Maison Tellier (1881). In the later part of the 19th century, the growth of print magazines and journals created a strong market demand for short fiction between 3,000 and 15,000 words in length. Among the famous short stories to come out of this time period was Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov. In the first half of the 20th Century, a number of high-profile magazines, such as The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, and The Saturday Evening Post, all published short stories in each issue. The demand for quality short stories was so great, and the money paid for them so high, that F. Scott Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to short story writing to pay off his numerous debts. The demand for short stories by print magazines hit its peak in the middle of the 20th century, when in 1952 Life Magazine published Ernest Hemingway's long short story (or novella) The Old Man and the Sea. The issue containing this story sold 5,300,000 copies in only two days. Since then, the number of commercial magazines that publish short stories has declined, even though several well-known magazines like The New Yorker continue to feature them. Literary magazines also provide a showcase for short stories. In addition, short stories have recently found a new life online, where they can be found in online magazines, in collections organized by author or theme, and on blogs.

Elements and characteristics

Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually, a short story will focus on only one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a limited number of characters, and covers a short period of time. In longer forms of fiction, stories tend to contain certain core elements of dramatic structure: exposition (the introduction of setting, situation and main characters); complication (the event of the story that introduces the conflict); rising action, crisis (the decisive moment for the protagonist and their commitment to a course of action); climax (the point of highest interest in terms of the conflict and the point of the story with the most action); resolution (the point of the story when the conflict is resolved); and moral. Because of their short length, short stories may or may not follow this pattern. For example, modern short stories occasionally have an exposition. More typical, though, is an abrupt beginning, with the story starting in the middle of the action. As with longer stories, plots of short stories also have a climax, crisis, or turning-point. However, the endings of many short stories are abrupt and open and may or may not have a moral or practical lesson. Of course, as with any art form, the exact characteristics of a short story will vary by author.

Length

Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that it must be able to be read in one sitting. Other definitions place the maximum word length (or number of words in the story) at 7,500 words. In contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words (at one extreme) and no shorter than 1,000. Stories shorter than 1,000 words fall into the flash fiction genre. Fiction surpassing the maximum word length parameters of the short story falls into the areas of novelettes, novellas, or novels.

Genres

Short stories are most often a form of fiction writing, with the most widely published form of short stories being genre fiction such as science fiction, horror fiction, detective fiction, and so on. The short story has also come to embrace forms of non-fiction such as travel writing, prose poetry and postmodern variants of fiction and non-fiction such as ficto-criticism or new journalism.

Examples of classic short stories

- [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html A Rose for Emily] by William Faulkner
- [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/heming.html The Snows of Kilimanjaro] by Ernest Hemingway, the classic stream-of-consciousness short story
- [http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Jackson/lottery The Lottery] by Shirley Jackson
- [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/goodman.html A Good Man Is Hard to Find] by Flannery O'Connor
- [http://www.auburn.edu/~vestmon/Gift_of_the_Magi.html The Gift of the Magi] by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)
- [http://www.literature.org/authors/poe-edgar-allan/tell-tale-heart.html The Tell-Tale Heart] by Edgar Allan Poe
- [http://art-bin.com/art/or_weltypostoff.html Why I live at the P.O.] by Eudora Welty

Other resources

- [http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters.html Million Writers Award for best online short story of the year]
- [http://titan.iwu.edu/~jplath/sschron.html Chronology of American short stories]
- [http://www.short-stories.co.uk Large online library of contemporary and classic short stories]
- [http://www.the-short-story.com/en/index.html Also an online library of contemporary and classic short stories]
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/results?title=short+stories Short Story eTexts] at Project Gutenberg
- [http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/results?subject=short+stories More Short Story eTexts] at Project Gutenberg
- [http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=109851 Jewish Chassidic Stories]

Fictional

, were the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility in Greek mythology.]] Fiction is storytelling of imagined events and stands in contrast to non-fiction, which makes factual claims about reality. A large part of the appeal of fiction is its ability to evoke the entire spectrum of human emotions: to distract our minds, to give us hope in times of despair, to make us laugh, or to let us experience empathy without attachment. Fictional works—novels, stories, fairy tales, fables, films, comics, interactive fiction—may be partly based on factual occurrences but always contain some imaginary content. The term is also often used synonymously with fictional prose. In this sense, fiction refers only to novels or short stories and is often divided into two categories, popular fiction (e.g., science fiction or mystery fiction) and literary fiction (e.g., Victor Hugo or William Faulkner). Fiction is largely perceived as a form of art and/or entertainment, although not all fiction is necessarily artistic. Fiction may be created for the purpose of educating, such as fictional examples used in school textbooks. Fiction is also frequently instrumentalized by propaganda and advertising. Fiction may be propagated by parents to their children out of tradition (e.g. Santa Claus) or in order to instill certain beliefs and values. Fables with an explicit moral goal are not necessarily targeted at children, however. Fiction may over time blend with factual accounts and develop into mythology. Many atheists perceive religion as no different from any fictional tale, whereas members of religious groups typically explain their beliefs with faith and claim they are fundamentally different from fictional tales (although they may call other religious views fictional). The sociological school of constructivism argues that every view of reality is fundamentally a construction of the self and that a safe distinction between fact and fiction is impossible, whereas the philosophy of naturalism holds that reality can be approximated and truth can be demonstrated through usefulness, allowing the distinction from fiction. Fiction has often been the target of censorship or boycotts, escalating into book burnings or bans. Extremist regimes like the Taliban have been even more prohibitive, restricting all reading to religious texts. There is an ongoing debate regarding sexual content in fiction and whether or not juveniles can be safely exposed to it; opponents of fiction with sexual content typically label it pornography. The Internet has had a massive impact on the distribution of fiction, calling into question the feasibility of copyright as a means to ensure royalties are payed to copyright holders. Also digital libraries such as Project_Gutenberg have come into being which make public domain texts more readily available. The combination of inexpensive home computers, the Internet and the creativity of its users has also led to new forms of fiction, such as interactive computer games or computer-generated comics. Countless forums for fan fiction can be found online, where loyal followers of specific fictional realms create and distribute derivative stories. Through open writing systems like wikis, collaboratively written fiction is also becoming possible (see the [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikifiction Wikifiction] initiative). Fiction is a fundamental part of human culture, and the ability to create fiction and other artistic works is frequently cited as one of the defining characteristics of humanity.

Elements of fiction

- antagonists
- conflicts
- climax
- characters
- plots
- protagonists
- resolution
- structures
- subplots
- themes
- fictional character
- suspension of disbelief

External links

- [http://book.awardannals.com/genre/fiction/ Most Honored Fiction] at the Book Award Annals
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- ja:フィクション

Narrative

In non-technical terms, no matter what the context (whether scientific, philosophical, legal, etc) a narrative is a story, an interpretation of some aspect of the world that is historically and culturally grounded and shaped by human personality (per Walter Fisher). Derived from the Latin word gnarus and the Indo-European root Gnu - 'to know', it came into English via the French language and it is used in a number of specialised applications.

Conceptual issues

Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs and studies the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and nonverbal elements, creating a discourse with different modalities and forms. In On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson argues that literature does not exist as a separate entity. He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are basically the same except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work Vladimir Propp who analysed the plots used in traditional folktales and identified distinct functional components. This trend continues in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. It leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important epistemological questions: What is text? What is its role in the contextual culture? How is it manifested as art, cinema, theatre, or literature? How as poetry, short stories and novels of different genres? Outside the mainstream of Semiotics, Walter Fisher has also offered a comprehensive theory known as the Narrative Paradigm.

Discussion

Human beings seem to prefer to shape information into the form of a "story". Rather than organising data as facts in logical relationships, most people retain their everyday information as anecdotal narratives with characters, plots, motivations, and actions. At its broadest level, Fisher argues that all communication is a form of storytelling. In his "Narrative Paradigm", he defines "narration" as symbolic actions, words, and/or deeds that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create or interpret them: a definition broad enough to support his claim that all meaningful communication is storytelling. Fisher suggests that everyone has the same two abilities in judging either the rationality or the modality of the story:
- to test for narrative coherence and probability, i.e. to see whether the story is "good", it must hold together as a credible sequence of events, and make sense in real world terms: and
- to confirm narrative fidelity, i.e. that it matches the values, beliefs, and experiences common to the audience. If it does, it will be a reasonably faithful portrayal of the real world and it will "resonate" with soundness.

Main criticisms of the Narrative Paradigm

The first and most obvious is that not all human discourse takes the form of a story. This page, for example, is not written with human characters and a plot. Although it might be possible to sustain the idea that Fisher, himself, is a character in the narrative of whether his theory will be accepted or not, this sequence of words does not match the normal reader's expectations for a narrative. However, Fisher then argues that the writer(s) of this page have their own narratives and, in offering this information to the reader, the writer(s) are inviting the readers to incorporate this information into their own lives. Secondly, Fisher does not define the relationship between narrative probability or fidelity, nor provide criteria for testing them. In general, he seems to be dismissing traditional philosophical standards of rationality with little to replace it with. Nevertheless, the Paradigm does represent an interesting parallel to the more traditional theories of Semiotics.

Literary theory

For general purposes in Semiotics and Literary Theory, a 'narrative' is a story or part of a story. A story is any form of text, regardless of medium, describing a sequence of events caused and experienced by characters, some of whom may be fictional. It may be spoken, written or imagined, and it will have one or more points of view representing some or all of the participants or observers. In stories told verbally, there is a person telling the story, a narrator whom the audience can see and hear, and who adds layers of meaning to the text nonverbally. The narrator also has the opportunity to monitor the audience's response to the story and to modify the manner of the telling to clarify content or enhance listener interest. This is distinguishable from the written form in which the author must gauge the readers likely reactions when they are decoding the text and make a final choice of words in the hope of achieving the desired response. Whatever the form, the content may concern real-world people and events. This is termed personal experience narrative. When the content is fictional, different conventions apply. The text is projecting a narrative voice, but the narrator is ontologically distant, i.e. belongs to an invented or imaginary world, and not the real world. The narrator may be one of the characters in the story. Roland Barthes describes such characters as 'paper beings' and fiction comprises their narratives of personal experience as created by the author. When their thoughts are included, this is termed internal focalisation, i.e. when each character's mind focuses on a particular event, the text reflects his or her reactions. In written forms, the reader hears the narrator's voice both through the choice of content and style (the author can encode voices for different emotions and situations, and the voices can either be overt or covert), and through clues that reveal the narrator's beliefs, values, and ideological stance, as well as the author's attitude towards people, events, and things. It is customary to distinguish a first-person from a third-person narrative (Gérard Genette (1980 [1972]) uses the terms homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative respectively). A homodiegetic narrator describes his or her personal and subjective experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know anything more about what goes on in the minds of any of the other characters than is revealed through their actions, whereas a heterodiegetic narrator describes the experiences of the characters who do appear in the story and, if the story's events are seen through the eyes of a third-person internal focaliser, this is termed a figural narrative. In some stories, the author may be overtly omniscient, and both employ multiple points of view and comment directly on events as they occur. Tzvetan Todorov (1969) coined the term narratology for the structuralist analysis of any given narrative into its constituent parts to determine their function(s) and relationships. For these purposes, the story is what is narrated as usually a chronological sequence of themes, motives and plot lines. Hence, the plot represents the logical and causal structure of a story, explaining why the events occur. The term discourse is used to describe the stylistic choices that determine how the narrative text or performance finally appears to the audience. One of the stylistic decisions may be to present events in a non-chronological order, say using flashbacks to reveal motivations at a dramatic moment.

Other specific applications

- Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.
- Narrative film is film which uses filmed reality to tell a story, often as a feature film.
- Narrative history is a genre of factual historical writing that uses chronology as its framework (as opposed to a thematic treatment of a historical subject).
- Narrative environment is a contested term that has been used for techniques of architectural or exhibition design in which 'stories are told in space' and also for the virtual environments in which computer games are played and which are invented by the computer game authors.

External links

- [http://www.storycode.com StoryCode] - is a free book recommendation service based on the analysis of narrative structures.
- [http://www.narratology.net Narrnet - The Narratology Network]
- [http://www.uni-koeln.de/%7Eame02/pppn.htm Manfred Jahn. Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative]

Prose

Prose is writing distinguished from poetry by its greater variety of rhythm and its closer resemblance to the patterns of everyday speech. The word prose comes from the Latin prosa, meaning straightforward. This describes the type of writing that prose embodies, unadorned with obvious stylistic devices. Prose writing is usually adopted for the description of facts or the discussion of ideas. Thus it may be used for newspapers, magazines, novels, encyclopedias, screenplays, films, philosophy, letters, essays, history, biography and many other forms of media. Prose generally lacks the formal structure of meter or rhyme that is often found in poetry. Although some works of prose may happen to contain traces of metrical structure or versification, a conscious blend of the two forms of literature is known as a prose poem. Similarly, poetry with less of the common rules and limitations of verse is known as free verse. Poetry is considered to be artificially developed, "The best words in the best order," whereas prose is thought to be less constructed and more reflective of ordinary speech. Pierre de Ronsard, the French poet said that his training as a poet had proved to him that prose and poetry were mortal enemies. In Molière's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme Monsieur Jourdain asks something to be written in neither verse nor prose. A philosophy master says "sir, there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse". Jourdain replies "By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it, and I am much obliged to you for having taught me that." The status of prose has changed throughout its history. Much of a society's early literature is written in the form of poetry. Prose was often restricted to mundane and everyday uses such as legal documents and yearly records. When a country's literature produced other forms such as philosophy or history these works expanded the realm of prose, but fiction does not often appear in prose until much later. Poetry is still often regarded as a higher form of literature to prose but the relatively late development of the novel offers competing and often superior examples of prose. Prose was at one time synonymous with dull, unimaginative or laboured writing and the word "prosaic" has developed from prose to mean anything boring. Now the word prose tends to be reserved for particularly well written pieces of literature and even limited to small sections of a larger work even though prose still also means any writing that is not poetry. Prose that aspires to the highest quality but in fact is too elaborate and overblown is called purple prose. Prose varies considerably depending on the purpose of the writing. As prose is often considered to be representative of the patterns of normal speech, many rhetorical devices are used in prose to emphasize points and enliven the writing. Prose which aims to be informative and accurate such as history or journalism usually strives to use the simplest language possible to express its points although this language often needs to get very advanced to describe a difficult issue. Facts are often repeated and reiterated in various ways so that they are understood by a reader but the excessive use of this technique can often make a serious piece of writing seem like a polemic. In fiction prose can flourish and take on many forms. A skilled author can alter how he uses prose throughout a book to suggest different moods and ideas. A thriller often consists of short sentences with "punch" made up of equally short words which suggests very rapid actions and heightens the effect of a very fast moving plot. Conversely, longer sentences are used to slow down the action of a novel and give a panoramic overview of scene. Prose can vary to tell a reader how they should feel about events in a story; fear, humour, uncertainty, or to tell the reader about a character's age, intelligence, opinions or personality although dialogue is often excluded from being thought of as prose. There are many techniques within fiction and the mark of a great author is perhaps their ability to manipulate prose and even invent their own unique prose style to effectively communicate what they wish to say. When a poem is translated from one language into another, particularly if it is an epic poem, the poem is often converted into prose. This is for two main reasons: not only does it allow the reader to understand the plot more easily but also the translator is considered to be exercising less unwelcome creative input if writing in prose. A translation should be an unchanged representation of the sense of the original but to impose the rhyme and meter structures of a different language is likely to significantly alter the poem.

External links

- [http://www.everyauthor.com/ EveryAuthor.com - online books and prose forums for writers] category:literature ja:散文

Novellas

: For the French commune, see Novella, Haute-Corse. A novella is a short, narrative, prose fiction work. Like the English word "novel", the English word "novella" derives from the Italian word "novella" (plural: "novelle" or "novellas"), for a tale, a piece of news. As the etymology suggests, novellas originally were news of town and country life worth repeating for amusement and edification. As a literary genre, the novella's origin lay in the early Renaissance literary work of the Italians and the French. Principally, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of The Decameron (1353)—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; and by the French Queen, Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), [aka Marguerite de Valois, et. alii.], author of Heptaméron (1559)—seventy-two original French tales (structured like The Decameron). Her psychological acuity and didactic purpose out-weigh the unfinished collection's weak literary style. Not until the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries did writers fashion the novella into a literary genre structured by precepts and rules. Contemporaneously, the Germans were the most active writers of the Novelle (German: "Novelle"; plural: "Novellen"). For the German writer, a novella is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length—a few pages to hundreds—restricted to a single, suspenseful event, situation, or conflict leading to an unexpected turning point (Wendepunkt), provoking a logical, but surprising end; Novellen tend to contain a concrete symbol, which is the narration's steady point. In German, the English word novella is Novelle, and the English word novel is the German Roman; this etymological distinction avoids confusion of the literatures and the forms, with the novel being the more important, established fictional form. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's (1881–1942) Die Schachnovelle (1942) (English: The Chess Novella), translated (1944) as The Royal Game, is an example of a title naming its genre. In English, a novella is a story mid-way—in length (15,000–40,000 words) and structural complexity—between a short story (500–15,000 words) and a novel (60,000 words, minimum). A novella focuses upon a single chain of events with a psychologically surprising turning point, e.g. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94); and Heart of Darkness (1902), by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924). Commonly, longer novellas are addressed as novels; though incorrectly, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Heart of Darkness are called novels, as are many science fiction works such as The War of the Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D.. Occasionally, longer works are addressed as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the novella–novel threshold. In the science fiction genre, the Hugo and Nebula literary awards define the novella as: "A…story of between seventeen thousand, five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words." Stephen King, in his introduction to Different Seasons, an anthology of four of his novellas, has called the novella "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic"; King notes the difficulties of selling a novella in the commercial publishing world, since it does not fit the typical length requirements of either magazine or book publishers.

Novels

A novel (from French nouvelle, "new") is an extended fictional narrative in prose. Down into the 18th century, the word referred specifically to short fictions of love and intrigue as opposed to romances—epic-length works about love and adventures. Having become one of the major literary genres over the past 200 years the novel is today the object of discussions demanding artistic merits, a specific literary style and a deeper meaning than a true story of the same content could claim to have. __TOC__

Novel/Romance: Unstable Words

One meaning of the English word novel has remained stable: novel can still signify what is new due to its "novelty". When it comes to fiction, though, the meaning of the term has changed over time:
- The period 1200-1750 saw a rise of the novel (originally a short piece of fiction) rivalling the romance (the epic-length performance): this development, which one could describe as the first rise of the novel, occurred across Europe, though only the Spanish and the English went one step further and allowed the word novel (or, in Spanish, novela) to become their regular term for fictional narratives.
- The period 1700-1800 saw the rise of a "new romance" in reaction against the potentially scandalous production of novels. The movement encountered a complex situation in the English market, where the term "new romance" could hardly be ventured, after the novel had done so much to transform taste. The new genre adopted the name novel: this new novel was a work of new epic proportions, with the effect that the English (and Spanish) finally needed a new word for the original short "novel": The term novella was finally created to fill the gap in English. "Short story" brought a further refinement. The meaning of the term romance changed within the same complex process, becoming the word for a love story whether in life or fiction. Other meanings include the musicologist's genre "Romance" of a short and amiable piece, or Romance languages for the languages derived from Latin (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and so forth).

History

Traditions of Prose Fiction: The Ancient World

As Pierre Daniel Huet noted in 1670, the tradition of epic works went back as far as Virgil and Homer. The regular format was verse, suiting the purpose of tradition in a culture of oral performances. Today, we see this tradition as going back even further, to the epic of Gilgamesh. It is more difficult to speak of the influence of the shorter performances of regular storytelling on the medieval traditions which led to the development of the novel/novella. There was a third tradition of prose fictions, both in a satirical mode (with Petronius's Satyricon and the incredible stories of Lucian of Samosata), and a heroic strain (with the romances of Heliodorus and Longus). The ancient Greek romance was revived by Byzantine novelists of the 12th century. All of these traditions were then rediscovered in the 17th and 18th centuries, ultimately influencing the modern book market.

The Romance, 1100-1500

The word romance seems to have become the label of romantic fictions because of the "Romance" language in which early (11th and 12th century) works of this genre were composed. The most fashionable genres developed in southern France in the late 12th century and spread east- and northwards with translations and individual national performances. Subject matter such as Arthurian knighthood had already at that time traveled in the opposite direction, reaching southern France from Britain and French Britanny. As a consequence, it is particularly difficult to determine how much the early "romance" owed to ancient Greek models and how much to such northern folkloric verse epics as Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied. The standard plot of the early romance was a series of adventures. Following a plot framework as old as Heliodorus, and so durable as to be still alive in Hollywood movies, a hero would undergo a first set of adventures before he met his lady. A separation would follow, with a second set of adventures leading to a final reunion. Variations kept the genre alive. Unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience with romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Classics of the romance developed such as the Roman de la Rose, written first in French, and famous today in English thanks to the translation by Geoffrey Chaucer. These original romances were verse works, adopting a "high language" thought suitable to heroic deeds, and to inspire the emulation of virtues; prose was considered "low", more suitable for satire). Verse allowed the culture of oral traditions to live on, yet it became the language of authors who carefully composed their texts—texts to be spread in writing, thus to preserve the careful artistic composition. The subjects were aristocratic. The textual tradition of ornamented and illustrated handwritten books afforded patronage by the aristocracy or by the monied urban class developing in the 13th and 14th centuries, for whom knight errantry most clearly was a world of fiction and fantasy. The 14th and 15th centuries saw the emergence of first prose romances, a genre rose along with a new book market. This market had developed even before the first printing facilities were introduced: prose authors could speak a new language, a language avoiding the repetition inherent in rhymes. Prose could risk a new rhythm and longer thoughts. Yet it needed the written book to preserve the coincidental formulations the author had chosen. Whilst the printing press was still to come, a commercial book production trade had developed. Legends, lives of saints and mystical visions in prose were the main object of the new market of prose productions. The urban elite, female readers in upper class households and monasteries read religious prose. Prose romances appeared as a new and expensive fashion on this market. They could only truly flourish with the invention of the printing press and with paper becoming a cheaper medium. Both of these achievements arrived in the late 15th century, when the old romance was already facing fierce competition from a number of shorter genres; most salient among these genres was the novel, a form that arose in the course of the 14th century.

The Emergence of the Novel, 1200-1500

Legend It is difficult to give a full catalog of the genres that finally culminated—with the works of Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Niccolò Machiavelli and Miguel de Cervantes—in the "novel" as known today . The early novel was basically any story told for its spectacular or revealing incidents. The original environment—living on with the typical frame settings—was the entertaining conversation. Stories of grave incidents could just as well augment sermons. Collections of examples facilitated the work of preachers in need of such illustrations. A fable could illustrate a moral conclusion; a short historical reflection could do the same. A competition of genres developed. Tastes and social status were—if one believes the medieval collections—decisive. The working classes loved their own brand of drastic stories: stories of clever cheating, wit and ridicule levelled against hated social groups (or competitors among the story tellers). Much of the original genre is still alive with the short joke told in everyday life to make a certain humorous point in a conversation. Artistic performances included the story within a story: situations in which a series of stories was allegedly told. They rejoiced in a broad pattern of tastes and genres. The Canterbury Tales constitute a classic example, with their noble storytellers fond of "romantic" stories and their lower narrators preferring stories of everyday life. The genre did not have its own generic term. "Novel" would simply denote the novelty of the accident narrated. The inclusion of frame stories, however, brought an awareness of the fact that genres were developing in this field. The main advantage of the background story was the justification it put into the hands of the actual authors such as Chaucer and Boccaccio. Romances afforded lofty language and relied on an accepted notion of what deserved to be read as high style. Yet what if the taste in moral teachings and poetry changed? Romances quickly outdated. Stories of cheats and pranks, illicit love affairs, and clever intrigues in which certain respectable professions or the citizens of another town were made fun of were, on the other hand, neither morally nor poetically justifiable. They carried their justification outside. The story teller would offer a few words why he thought this story was worth being told. Again, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales afford the best examples: the real author could tell stories without any other justification than that this story gave a good portrait of the person who told it and of his or her taste—and that justification would remain stable throughout history. If lofty performances grew tedious—as they did in the 14th and 15th centuries with the old plots never leading to newer ones—the collections of tales or novels made it easy to criticise the lofty performances and to reduce their status: one of the group of narrators (created by the actual author) could start with the romantic story only to be interrupted by the other narrators listening within the story. They might silence him or order him to speak a language they liked, or they might ask him to speed up and to make his point. The result was a rise of the short genre. The steps of this development can be noted with the short story gaining appreciation and the value to rival romances in new versified collections at the end of the 14th century.

The First Rise of the Novel, 1500-1750

The Canterbury Tales The invention of printing subjected both novels and romances to a first wave of trivialisation and commercialisation. Printed books were expensive, yet something people would buy, just as people still buy expensive things they can barely afford. Alphabetisation, or the rise of literacy, was a slow process when it came to writing skills, but was faster as far as reading skills were concerned. The Protestant Reformation afforded readers of religious pamphlets, newspapers and broadsheets. The urban population learned to read, but did not aspire to participation in the world of letters. The market of chapbooks developing with the printing press comprised both romances and little histories, tales and fables. Woodcuts were the regular ornament and they were offered without much care. A romance in which the heroic knight had to fight more than ten duels within a few pages could get the same illustration of such a fight again and again if the printers stock of standard illustrations was small. As their stocks grew, printers repeated the same illustrations in other books with similar plots, mixing these illustrations without respect to style. You can open 18th century chapbooks and find illustrations from the early years of printing next to more modern ones. Romances were reduced to cheap and abrupt plots resembling modern comic books. Neither were the first collections of novels necessarily prestigious projects. They appeared with an enormous variety from folk tales over jests to stories told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, now venerable authors. comic book comic book comic book A more prestigious market of romances developed in the 16th century, with multi-volume works aiming at an audience which would subscribe to this production. The criticism levelled against romances by Chaucer's pilgrims grew in response both to the trivialisations and to the extended multi-volume "romances". Romances like the Amadis de Gaula led their readers into dream worlds of knighthood and fed them with ideals of a past no one could revitalise, or so the critics complained. Italian authors like Machiavelli were among those who brought the novel into a new format: while it remained a story of intrigue, ending in a surprising point, the observations were now much finer: how did the protagonists manage their intrigue? How did they keep their secrets, what did they do when others threatened to discover them? The whole question of novels and romances became critical when Cervantes added his Novelas Exemplares (1613) to the two volumes of his Don Quixote (1605/15). The famous satirical romance was levelled against the Amadis which had made Don Quixote lose his mind. Advocates of the lofty romance would, however, claim that the satirical counterpart of the old heroic romance could hardly teach anything: Don Quixote neither offered a hero to be emulated nor did it satisfy with beautiful speeches; all it could do was to make fun of lofty ideals. The Novelas Exemplares offered an alternative between the heroic and the satiric mode, yet critics were even less sure about what to make of this production. Cervantes told stories of adultery, jealousy and crime. If these stories were to give examples, they gave examples of immoral actions. The advocates of the "novel" responded that their stories taught both with good and with bad examples. The reader could still feel compassion and sympathy with the victims of crimes and intrigues, if evil examples were to be told. The alternative to dubious novels and satirical romances were better, lofty romances: a production of romances modeled after Heliodorus arrived as a possible answer with excursions into the bucolic world. Honoré d'Urfés L'Astrée (1607-27) became the most famous work of this type. The criticism that these romances had nothing to do with real life was answered through the device of the roman à clef (literally "novel with a key", one that, properly understood, alludes to characters in the real world). John Barclay's Argenis (1625-26) appeared as a political roman à clef. The romances of Madeleine de Scudéry gained greater influence with plots situated in the ancient world and content taken from life. The famous author told stories of her friends in the literary circles of Paris and developed their fates from volume to volume of her serialised production. Readers of taste bought her books, as they offered the finest observation of human motives, characters taken from life, excellent morals regarding how one should and should not behave if one wanted to succeed in public life and in the intimate circles she portrayed. The novel went its own way: Paul Scarron (himself a hero in the romances of Madeleine de Scudéry) published the first volume of his Roman Comique in 1651 (successive volumes appeared in 1657 and, by another hand, in 1663) with a plea for the development Cervantes had induced in Spain. France should (as he wrote in the famous 21st chapter of his Roman Comique [http://www.pierre-marteau.com/library/e-1700-0002.html#c21]) imitate the Spanish with little stories like those they called "novels". Scarron himself added numerous of such stories to his own work. Twenty years later Madame de La Fayette made the next decisive steps with her two novels. The first, her Zayde published in 1670 together with Pierre Daniel Huet's famous Treatise on the Origin of Romances, was a "Spanish History". Her second and more important novel appeared in 1678: La Princesse de Clèves proved that France could actually produce novels of a particularly French taste. The Spanish enjoyed stories of proud Spaniards who fought duels to avenge their reputations. The French had a more refined taste with minute observation of human motives and behaviour. The story was firmly a "novel" and not a "romance": a story of unparalleled female virtue, with a heroine who had had the chance to risk an illicit amour and not only withstood the temptation but made herself more unhappy by confessing her feelings to her husband. The gloom her story created was entirely new and sensational. The regular novel took another turn. The late 17th century saw the emergence of a European market for scandal, with French books appearing now mostly in the Netherlands (where censorship was liberal) to be re-imported clandestinely back into France. The same production reached the neighbouring markets of Germany and Britain, where it was welcomed both for its French style and its predominantly anti-French politics. The novel flourished on this market as the best genre to purport scandalous news. The authors claimed the stories they had to tell were true, told not for the sake of scandal but only for the moral lessons they gave. To prove this, they fictionalized the names of their characters and told these stories as if they were novels. (The audience played its own game in identifying who was who). Journals of little stories appeared—the Mercure Gallant became the most important. Collections of letters added to the market; these included more of these little stories and led to the development of the epistolary novel in the late 17th century. In the late 1670s the novel reached the English market. Aphra Behn and William Congreve were among the first modern English authors to adopt the term.

State of Affairs: The Market around 1700

Early 18th century novels and romances were still not considered part the world of learning, hence, not of part of literature; they were market goods. If you opened the term catalogues it was mostly situated in the—predominantly political—field of "History and Politicks" with some romances like Cervantes Don Quixote translated into verse becoming poetical. The integration of prose fiction into the market of histories appeared under the following scheme:

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		3.1 Heroical Romances: Fénelon's Telemach (1699)
1 Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of public affairs: Manley's New Atalantis (1709)	2 Sold as romantic inventions, read as true histories of private affairs: Menantes' Satyrischer Roman (1706)	3.2 Classics of the novel from the Arabian Nights to M. de La Fayette's Princesse de Cleves (1678)	4 Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719)	5 Sold as true public history, risking to be read as romantic invention: La Guerre d'Espagne (1707)
		3.3 Satirical Romances: Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605)	From Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa (Amsterdam, 2001), p.194.

The centre of the market was held by fictions which claimed to be fictions and which were read as such. They comprised a high production of romances and, at the bottom end, an opposing production of satirical romances. In the centre, the novel had grown, with stories that were neither heroic nor predominantly satirical, yet mostly realistic, short and stimulating with their examples of human actions to be discussed. The central production had two wings: On the left hand, one had books which claimed to be romances, but which threatened to be anything but fictitious. Delarivier Manley wrote the most famous of them, her New Atalantis, full of stories the author claimed to have invented. The censors were helpless: Manley had hawked stories discrediting the ruling Whigs, yet should they ask the Whigs to prove that all these stories actually happened on British soil rather than on the fairy tale island Atalantis? This was what they had to do if they wanted to sue the author. Delarivier Manley escaped the interrogations unscathed and continued her libellous work with three more volumes of the same ilk. Private stories appeared on the same market, creating a different genre of personal love and public battles over lost reputations. On the other hand one had a market of titles which claimed to be strictly non-fictional—Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe became the most important of them. The genre-identification: "Sold as true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention" opened the preface:

IF ever the Story of any Man's Adventures in the World were worth making Publick, and were acceptable when Publish'd, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so.
     The Wonders of this Man's Life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant; the Life of one Man being scarce capable of a greater Variety.
     The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honor the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of Circumstances, let them happen how they will.
     The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch'd, that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.

A production of histories of similar verisimilitude dove into the overtly political. Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644-1712) became the most important author in this field with his first version of d'Artagnan's story, told again more than a century later by Alexandre Dumas the elder. Witty, and a distant precursor of Ian Fleming's fictional James Bond, is another book allegedly by his hand: La Guerre d'Espagne (1707) the story of a disillusioned French spy, who gave insight into French politics—and into his own love affairs, with little intrigues he managed wherever he had to do his jobs. Fact and fiction were mixed in all these titles, to the point that one could no longer tell where the author had invented and where he had simply betrayed secrets.

The Second Rise of the Novel or the New Romance, 1700-1800

The early 18th century had—with the novel diving into private and public scandal—reached a state of affairs where a new reform seemed desirable. The old Amadis could be said to have driven its readers into dream worlds, and the new novels, devoid of lofty speeches and incredible acts of heroism, had done much to refine taste. Yet they had created entirely new risks, with stories of love in which children cheated their parents, and with which private and public gossip were published on the open market. Jane Barker was among the 18th century voices who demanded a return to the old antiquated romance. Her "New Romance" Exilius (1715) opened with the sketch of a new tradition: the romance had, so Jane Barker claimed, developed from Geoffrey Chaucer to François Fénelon; the latter was the author who had just become famous with his epochal romance Telemachus (1699/1700). Fénelon's English publishers had carefully avoided the term "romance" and rather published a "new epic in prose"—so the prefaces. Jane Barker insisted, however, on publishing her Exilius as "New Romance [...] after the manner of Telemachus", and failed on the market. In 1719 her publisher, Edmund Curll, finally removed the old title pages and offered her works as a collection of novels. The big market success of the next decade—Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe—appeared that very year and W. Taylor, the publisher, avoided all these traps with a title page claiming neither the realm of novels nor that of romances, but that of histories, yet with a page design tasting all too much of the "new romance" with which Fénelon had just become famous. histories Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was everything but a novel, as the term was understood at the time. It was neither short, nor did it focus on an intrigue, nor was it told for the sake of a clear cut point. Nor was Crusoe an anti-hero of a satirical romance, though he spoke the first person singular and had stumbled into all kinds of miseries. He did not really invite laughter (though readers of taste would read, of course, all his proclamations about being a real man as made in good humour). The feigned author was serious: Against his will his life had brought him into this series of most romantic adventures. He had fallen into the hands of pirates and survived years on an uninhabited island. He had survived all this—a mere sailor from York—with exemplary heroism. If readers read his work as a romance, full of sheer invention, he could not blame them. He and his publisher knew that all he had to tell was strictly unbelievable, and yet they would claim it was true (and if not, still readable as good allegory)—the complex game which puts this work into the fourth column of the pattern above.

The Market of Classics and the Reform of the Novel, 1700-1800

allegory The publication of Robinson Crusoe did not lead into the mid-18th century market reform. Crusoe's books were published as a dubious histories; they played the game of the scandalous early 18th century market, with the novel fully integrated into the realm of histories. They even appeared reprinted by one of the London newspapers as a possibly true relation of facts. Philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned Robinson Crusoe into a classic decades later, and it took another century before one could see Defoe's book as the first English "novel"—published, as Ian Watt saw it in 1957, as an answer to the market of French romances. The reform of the early 18th century market of novels came with the production of classics: 1720 saw the decisive edition of classics of the European novel published in London with titles from Machiavelli to Marie de LaFayette. Aphra Behn's novels had over the last decades appeared in collections of her works. The author of the 1680s had become a classic by now. Fénelon had become a classic years ago, as had Heliodorus. The works of Petronius and Longos appeared, equipped with prefaces which put them into the tradition of prose fiction Huet had defined. Prose fiction itself had, according to the critics, a history of ups and downs: having run into a crisis with the Amadis, it found its remedy with the novel. It now needed continuous care. Yet, all in all, it could claim to be the most elegant part of the belles lettres, the new market segment within the bigger market of literature, embracing the new classics. Huet's Traitté de l'origine des romans first published in 1670 and now circulating in a number of translations and editions won a central position among those writings which had dealt with prose fiction. The Treatise had created the first corpus of texts to be discussed and it had been the first title that demonstrated how one could "interpret" worldly fictions—just as a theologian would interpret parts of the gospel in a theological debate. The interpretation needed its aims, of course—and Huet had offered a number of questions one could ask: What did the fictional work of a foreign culture or distant period tell us about those who constructed the fiction? What were the cultural needs such stories answered? Are there fundamental anthropological premises which make us create fictional worlds? Did these fictions entertain, divert and instruct? Did they—as one could assume when reading ancient and medieval myths—just provide a substitute for better, more scientific knowledge or did they add to the luxuries of life a particular culture enjoyed? The ancient Mediterranean erotic stories could afford such an interpretation. The interpretation and analysis of classics placed readers of fictions in an entirely new and improved position: it made a vast difference whether you read a romance and got lost in a dream world or whether you read the same romance with a preface telling you more about the Greeks, Romans or Arabs who produced titles like the Aethopica or The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (first published in Europe from 1704 to 1717 in French and translated immediately from this edition into English and German).

To be Discussed: The Novel turning into Literature, 1740-1800

The Book of One Thousand and One Nights The early 18th century market for classics of prose fiction inspired living authors. Aphra Behn turned from an anonymous hack into a celebrated author after her death. Fénelon achieved the same fame during his life time. Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker and Eliza Haywood followed their famous French models who had dared to claim fame with their real names: the Madame d'Aulnoy and Anne Marguerite Petit DuNoyer. Most previous novels had been pseudonymous; now they became the productions of famous authors. The discourse necessary to appreciate such a move towards responsibility was yet underdeveloped. Journals discussing literature focussed on "learning", literature in the strict sense of the word. So far, most discussion of novels and romances had taken place within the field itself. Literary criticism, a critical—external—discourse about poetry and fiction arose in the second half of the 18th century. It opened an interaction between separate participants in which novelists would write in order to be criticised and in which the public would observe the interaction between critics and authors. The new criticism of the late 18th century offered a reform by establishing a market of works worthy to be discussed (whilst the rest of the market would thus continue but lose most of its public appeal). The result was a market division into a low field of popular fictions and a critical literary production. The latter privileged works which rivalled ancient verse epics to be discussed as art, which played with the traditions of prose fiction (they opened an internal discourse about the history of literature), and which were of a clearly defined fictional status—they alone could be discussed as works created by an artist who wanted this and no other story to be discussed by the audience. The old design of title pages changed: New novels no longer pretended to sell fictions whilst threatening to betray real secrets. Nor did they appear as false "true histories". The new title pages pronounced their works to be fictions, and indicated how the public might discuss them. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1740) was one of the titles which brought the old novel-title with its "[...] or [...]" formula offering an example into the new format: "Pamela or Virtue Rewarded – Now first published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes, A Narrative which has the Foundation in Truth and Nature; and at the same time that it agreeably entertains…" So the title page read, and made it clear that the work was crafted by an artist aiming at a certain effect—yet to be discussed by the critical audience. A decade later novels, needed no other status than that of being novels, fiction. Present-day editions of novels simply state "Fiction" on the cover. It had become prestigious to be sold under the label, asking for discussion and thought. Scandal as the DuNoyer or Delarivier Manley had published it vanished from the market of prose fiction—whether high or low. It could not attract serious critics and it was lost if it remained undiscussed. It ultimately needed its own brand of scandalous journalism—the journalism which developed with the yellow press. The low market of prose fiction went on to focus on immediate satisfaction of an audience enjoying its stay in the fictional world. The high market grew complex, with works playing new games. On the high market, one could eventually see two traditions developing: one of works playing with the art of fiction—Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is among them—the other closer to the prevailing discussions and moods of its audience. The great conflict of the 19th century was yet to come, as to whether artists should write to satisfy the public or whether to produce art for art's sake.

Sentimentalism, Psychology, and a New Individual, 1750-1850

The mid- and late 18th century novel of sentimentalism produced an entirely new individual, one with a different attitude towards privacy and the public. Had the early 18th century heroine been bold and ready to protect her reputation if necessary in a press war her mid-18th century descendant was far too modest and shy to do the same. Early 18th century heroines had their secrets, they loved effective intrigues, they tried whatever they felt necessary to get what they wanted. Mid-18th century heroines developed a feeling of modesty. They suffered if they had to keep secrets and felt an urge to confess. They searched for friends and intimacy, for situations in which they could freely open their hearts and speak of their deepest wishes. The 18th century audience saw these new heroes and heroines with amazement. When it came to their most secret wishes they dared to confide in their parents and friends—a trust which would have made them easy victims in the early 18th century world of fiction, libel, intrigue and scandal. Now, however, these weak heroines met an environment of compassion. Instead of making their affairs a public entertainment, the new heroes and heroines developed an intimacy into which the novel alone could take a careful look. Special genres flourished with these protagonists who would not wash their dirty linen in the public: Their letters or diaries were found and published only after their death. A wave of sentimentalism was the first result, leading to heroes like Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771). A second wave followed with more radical heroes who could no longer dream of an environment understanding them. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was at the forefront of the new movement, and yielded a wave of compassion and understanding with readers ready to follow Werther into his suicide. Critics embraced the new heroes as the best sign of a new literature which aimed at discussions. The understanding these heroes craved for afforded a secondary discussion—a discussion of the nature of the human psyche so much better observed by these new novels. The novel had, with these developments, turned advocacy of individual and societal moral reform into a genre. With the romantic movement beginning in the 1770s, the development went one step further: the novel became the medium of an avant garde, the genre where emotions found their test cases. The Bildungsroman developed in Germany—a novel focussing on the development of the individual, his or her education and its way into individuality and society. New sciences—from sociology to psychology—developed with the new individual and influenced the discussions surrounding the novel in the 19th century.

The 19th century and the Novel as the object of great Discussions

At the beginning of the 17th century the novel had been a genre of realism fighting the romance with its wild fantasies. The novel had turned to scandal, then it had been reformed over the last decades of the 18th century. Fiction eventually became the most honourable field of literature. A wave of novels of fantasy culminated this development at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century. Sensibility was heightened in these novels. Women, overwrought and prone to imagining worlds beyond their appointed one, became the heroines of the new world of "romances" and "Gothic novels" creating stories in distant times and places. Renaissance Italy was a favourite of the gothic novel. The classic Gothic novel is Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). As in other Gothic novels, the notion of the sublime is central. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was awful (awe-inspiring) and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. The characters and landscapes of the Gothic rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine the great exception. The "beautiful" heroine's susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hyper-sensibility. At the beginning of the 19th century, the overwrought emotions of sensibility, as expressed through the Gothic sublime, had run their course. Jane Austen wrote a Gothic novel parody titled Northanger Abbey (1803), reflecting the death of the Gothic novel. Moreover, while sensibility did not disappear, it was less valued. Austen introduced a different style of writing—the comedy of manners. Her novels often are not only funny, but also scathingly critical of the restrictive, rural culture of the early 19th century. Her best known novel, Pride and Prejudice (1811), is her happiest, and has been a blueprint for much subsequent romantic fiction; her novels are still retain a wide following, despite the distance between their heroines' dilemmas and those of a 21st-century reader. The market for novels in the 19th century separated into a new "high" and "low" production. The new high production can best be viewed in terms of national traditions. The low production is rather organised by genres in a pattern deriving from the spectrum of 17th- and 18th-century genres: 1. Literature (with a capital L) promoted by critical discourse.

Spanish Literature

French Literature

German Literature

English Literature

…by language and nation

2. Popular Fiction not promoted by criticism

1
The modern roman à clef (a recent example is Primary Colors)

2
Sex, including soft "romantic" pornography for the female audience

3
Historical settings (the tradition of heroic romances), crime (the tradition of the 17th century novel)

4
Adventure, Science fiction

5
Espionage, Conspiracy

The position of authors attained its modern form with the establishment of this pattern. The modern author can aim at broad market or write with an eye to serious critical discussion. The borders between the realms have developed differently in different nations. While this modern market divide came relatively late to the English-speaking world, Germany and France had an earlier and much stronger interest in creating national literatures—France in the wake of the French Revolution, Germany during its mid-19th-century unification. Both of these nations experienced a division between high literature—discussed in schools and newspapers, and celebrated in public life—and a low production—not worthy to be mentioned in such circles— while the vast commercial market of the English-speaking world still resisted this artificial divide. Here and there new author identities developed as the novel proved to be a perfect medium for a communication both intimate (novels are read by privately whereas plays are always a public event) and public (novels are published and thus become a matter touching the public if not the nation and its vital interests), a medium of a personal point of view which can get the world into its view. New modes of interaction between authors and the public reflected these developments: authors reading in the public, authors receiving prestigious prizes, authors giving interviews in the media and acting as their nations' conscience. This concept of the novelist as public figure arose in the course of the 19th century.

The 20th Century: From Modernism to Postmodernism

Modernist literature and Postmodern literature

Individual Novels Discussed

From Western antiquity—Greece and Rome—these are the earliest, extant novels:
- Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus (Greek, 4th century BC). A largely fictional account of the education of King Cyrus the Great of Persia. This is considered a precursor to the novel.
- Petronius, Satyricon (Latin, 1st century).
- Apuleius, The Golden Ass (Latin, 2nd century).
- Chariton, The Loves of Chaereas and Callirhoe (Greek, 1st century–2nd century).
- Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon (Greek, 2nd century).
- Longus, Daphnis and Chloe (Greek, 2nd century).
- Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesian Tale (Greek, 2nd century–3rd century).
- Heliodorus, Ethiopian Tale (Greek, 3rd century–4th century).
- Anon, Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca (Greek, 3rd century–4th century).
- Anon, Joseph and Aseneth (Greek, 1st century–5th century).
- Anon, The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre (Latin adaptation of lost Greek original, 5th century–6th century).

Asian works

Early important Asian novels include:
- Dandin, The Adventures of the Ten Princes (Sanskrit, 6th century–7th century).
- Banabhatta, Kadambari (Sanskrit, 7th century).
- Anon, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Japanese, 10th century).
- Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (Japanese, 11th century). Arguably the first novel, in the sense of a continued fictional narrative written by one author.
- Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Chinese, 14th century).
- Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong, Water Margin (Chinese, 15th century).
- Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West (Chinese, 16th century).
- Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber (Chinese, 18th Century).

The 13th century

- Ramon Llull, Blanquerna (1283)

The 14th century

- Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (1353)
- Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (1386-1400)

The 15th century

- Antoine de la Sale, Petit Jehan de Saintré (1456)
- Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur, (English, 1485).
- Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc (Catalan, 1490), chivalric romance.

The 16th century

- Jacopo Sannazaro, La Arcadia, (Italian, 1504), pastoral novel.
- Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadis de Gaula (Spanish adaptation of lost 13th century original, 1508).
- Thomas More, Utopia (Latin, circa 1516).
- François Rabelais, Pantagruel, (French, 1532).
- Jorge de Montemayor, La Diana (Spanish, 1559), pastoral novel.
- Anon, Lazarillo de Tormes (Spanish, 1554).
- Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache (Spanish, 1599).

The 17th century

- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605).
- Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas Exemplares (1613).
- Francisco de Quevedo, El buscón (Spanish, 1626), masterpiece of the picaresque subgenre.
- Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus (German, 1668/1669), the Thirty Years War put into satirical autobiography.
- Aphra Behn, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (British, 1684/1685/1687), the first full blown epistolary novel.
- Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, (British, 1688).

The 18th century

- Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, (British, 1719)
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, (British, 1719)
- Samuel Richardson, Pamela, (British, 1740)
- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, (British, 1749)
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, (British, 1759-1767)
- Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, (Scottish, 1771)
- Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Nicholas Experience (the first Polish novel, 1776).
- Frances Burney, Evelina, (British, 1778)
- Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, (

Fictional character

A fictional character is any person who appears in a work of fiction. More accurately, a fictional character is the person or conscious entity we imagine to exist within the world of such a work. In addition to people, characters can be aliens, animals, gods or, occasionally, inanimate objects. Characters are almost always at the center of fictional texts, especially novels and plays. It is, in fact, hard to imagine a novel or play without characters, though such texts have been attempted (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the most famous examples). In poetry, there is almost always some sort of person present, but often only in the form of a narrator or an imagined listener. In various forms of theatre, performance arts and cinema (except for animation and CGI movies), fictional characters are performed by actors, dancers and singers. In animations and puppetry, they are voiced by voice actors, though there have been several examples, particularly, in machinima, where characters are voiced by computer generated voices. The process of setting up characters for a work of fiction is called characterization.

Names of characters

The names of fictional characters are often quite important. The conventions of naming have changed over time. In many Restoration comedies, for example, characters are given emblematic names that sound nothing like real life names: "Sir Fidget", "Mr. Pinchwife" and "Mrs. Squeamish" are some typical examples (all from The Country Wife by William Wycherley). Some 18th and 19th century texts, on the other hand, represent characters' names by the use of a single letter and a long dash (this convention is also used for other proper nouns, such as place names). This has the effect of suggesting that the author had a real person in mind but omitted the full name for propriety's sake. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo uses this technique. One reason for this dash is that, in Britain and in other countries with a feudal heritage, the names of counties and places might be the names of the feudal lords over those places. One cannot arbitrarily give someone the name "Earl of Manchester" because someone may either have or be elevated to such a title, so it may be grounds for a lawsuit. Hence fictitious names are based on disparaged historical characters, or tend to be re-used. For example, "Lady de Winter" is a character in Dumas pères Three Musketeers, and the family name was used in Du Maurier's Rebecca. (The same holds true for the names of houses: in the latter book, "Windermere" is named after a lake, not a feudal holding). The 19th century movements of sentimentalism, realism and naturalism all encouraged readers to imagine characters as real people by giving them realistic names, names that were often the titles of books, such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre or Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. These conventions were followed by the majority of subsequent literature, including most contemporary literature. However, there are few characters with names that are completely arbitrary. At the very least, names tend to indicate nationality and status. Often, the literal meaning or origin of a name is of some symbolic importance.
Some ways of reading characters
Readers vary enormously in how they understand fictional characters. The most extreme ways of reading fictional characters would be to think of them exactly as real people or to think of them as purely artistic creations that have everything to do with craft and nothing to do with real life. Most styles of reading fall somewhere in between. Here are some typical ways of reading fictional characters in literary criticism:
Character as symbol
In some readings, certain characters are understood to represent a given quality or abstraction. Rather than simply being people, these characters stand for something larger. Many characters in Western literature have been read as Christ symbols, for example. Other characters have been read as symbolizing capitalist greed (as in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby), the futility of fulfilling the American Dream, or quixotic romanticism (Don Quixote).
Character as representative
Another way of reading characters symbolically is to understand each character as a representative of a certain group of people. For example, Bigger Thomas of Native Son by Richard Wright is often seen as representative of young black men in the 1930s, doomed to a life of poverty and exploitation. Dagny Taggart and other characters from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand are seen as representative of American's hard-nosed, hard-working class. Many practitioners of cultural criticism and feminist criticism focus their analysis of characters on cultural stereotypes. In particular, they consider the ways in which authors rely on and/or work against stereotypes when they create their characters. Such critics, for example, would read Native Son in relation to racist stereotypes of African American men as sexually violent (especially against white women). In reading Bigger Thomas' character, one could ask in what ways Richard Wright relied on these stereotypes to create a violent African-American male character and in what ways he fought against it by making that character the protagonist of the novel rather than an anonymous villain. Often, readings that focus on stereotypes demand that we focus our attention on seemingly unimportant characters, such as the ubiquitous sambo characters in early cinema. Minor characters, or stock characters, are often the focus of this kind of analysis since they tend to rely more heavily on stereotypes than more central characters.
Characters as historical or biographical references
Sometimes characters obviously represent important historical figures. For example, Nazi-hunter Yakov Liebermann in The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin is often compared to real life Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and corrupted populist politician Willie Stark from All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren is often compared to Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. Other times, authors base characters on people from their own personal lives. Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb chronicles her love affair with Lord Byron, who is thinly disguised as the title character. Nicole, a destructive, mentally ill woman in Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is often seen as a fictionalized version of Fitzgerald's wife Zelda. Perhaps because so many people enjoy imagining characters as real people, many critics devote their time to seeking out real people on whom literary figures were likely based. Frequently authors base stories on themselves or their loved ones.
Character as words
Some language- or text-oriented critics emphasize that characters are nothing more than certain conventional uses of words on a page: names or even just pronouns repeated throughout a text. They refer to characters as functions of the text. Some critics go so far as to suggest that even authors do not exist outside the texts that construct them.
Character as patient: psychoanalytic readings
Psychoanalytic criticism usually treats characters as real people

Short story

History

Modern short stories

Elements and characteristics

Length

Genres

See also

Examples of classic short stories

Other resources

Fictional

Categories of fiction

Elements of fiction

See also

External links

Narrative

Conceptual issues

Discussion

Main criticisms of the Narrative Paradigm

Literary theory

See also

Other specific applications

External links

Related reading

Prose

See also

External links

Novellas

See also

Novels

Novel/Romance: Unstable Words

History

Traditions of Prose Fiction: The Ancient World

The Romance, 1100-1500

The Emergence of the Novel, 1200-1500

The First Rise of the Novel, 1500-1750

State of Affairs: The Market around 1700

The Second Rise of the Novel or the New Romance, 1700-1800

The Market of Classics and the Reform of the Novel, 1700-1800

To be Discussed: The Novel turning into Literature, 1740-1800

Sentimentalism, Psychology, and a New Individual, 1750-1850

The 19th century and the Novel as the object of great Discussions

The 20th Century: From Modernism to Postmodernism

Individual Novels Discussed

Asian works

The 13th century

The 14th century

The 15th century

The 16th century

The 17th century

The 18th century

Fictional character

Names of characters

Some ways of reading characters

Character as symbol

Character as representative

Characters as historical or biographical references

Character as words

Character as patient: psychoanalytic readings