The rise of the novel and his characteristics

The rise of the novel and his characteristics

Literature is always linked to the historical social and economic background of a country. Eighteen century was an age of prosperity, commerce, agriculture and industry expanded enormously increasing the national wealth; in politics Parliament became more and more powerful after bloodless revolution, ensured political liberty and freedom of speech. The religious struggle of the previous age ended with the Toleration Act of 1689. The middle classes became stronger and stronger. Literature was no longer under the patronage of the Court; writers supported trough their works politicians and statement in political controversies getting influence and fame while the reading public which was going wader and wader, aloud them financial returns and social states.

The novel was the best achievement of the 18^th literature because it's the form which most fully reflects the taste of the time, the new tendency of culture and the exceptions of the reading public . In this century the novel, whose primary criteria were independence from the tradition of past thought and faith only in the individual experience , always unique and therefor new , is this the logical literary vehicle of a culture which has set and an enormous value on realism , on originality and individualism .The realism of the novel is part of a much larger movement involving the end of the medieval world ,and a post Renaissance view of men as an individual. Modern realism in fact is based on the firm conviction that truth can be discovered by men through his senses . Personal experience takes the places of collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality. Realism now denotes a belief in the individual apprehension of reality through the senses , which is original ( original with the meaning of " independent , underived , first hand ) .So a novel is a original representation of a reality as it appears to the individual . To a comply this new literary form, novelists needed some formal innovations. First of all they didn't take their plots from mythology, history legends or previous literature. Their interests rested on reality. The plot and the actors were placed in a new literary prospective: the plot had to be acted by particular people in particular circumstances, rather than by general human tips in a conventional literary background. To stress that the characters were to be regarded as particular individual in the contemporary social environment and not as general type, the novelists of this time used authentic proper names and surnames such as Robinson Cruse or Panel or Tom Jones. The rejected the names, widely used by previous writers (Sidney, Spencer),which carried foreign archaic or literary connotations without referring to real and contemporary life. Another brake with the tradition was the fact that they didn't accept the celebrated unites of time, space and action.

The new contents of the novel needed a type of language which suited it better. The figurative language with his bulk of rhetoric and eloquence widely used for romances was going to be substituted for a simpler kind of expression: it was a means to tell feelings not away to show the author's skill. Eighteen century's novelists used a language that was a close correspondence between words and objects; in this way they could achieve immediacy and authenticity as the novel was no more than a transcription of real life; but in the pursuit of this aim, Defoe and Richardson were sometimes inaccurate and traditionalists writers. The success of  the novel was due to the increasing of the reading-public. This process was helped by circulating libraries, the low prices of subscription, the role played by women readers, who became more and more numerous. This last aspect was the reason why a crowd of female characters are to be found in the novels. The dominance of the middle-classes in the reading-public who decide a simpler form of literature accounts for the style and the subjects of the novel. Free from the weight of the literary past, Defoe and Richardson express in their work the great power and self-confidence of the middle classes. Their most important characters are from this social stratum, whose tastes and ideals they foully reflect.