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Uzis Novel

A fictional narrative

Fictionality is the feature most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. From a

historical perspective it can be a problematic criterion. Authors of histories in narrative form

throughout the early modern period would often include inventions that were rooted in traditional

beliefs or that would embellish a passage or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would thus

invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the

social, political, and personal realities of a place and period with a clarity and detail historians would

not dare to explore.

The line between history and novel can be defined in aesthetic terms: Novels are supposed to show

qualities of literature and art. Histories are by contrast supposed to be written in order to fuel a

public debate over historical responsibilities. A novel can hence deal with history. It will be analyzed,

however, with a look at the almost timeless value it is supposed to show in the hands of private

readers as a work of art.

Literary value is a source of constant argument: Does the specific novel possess the "eternal

qualities" of art, the "deeper meaning" revealed by critical interpretation? The debate itself has

allowed critics to develop the investigation and meaning of texts marked as 'fiction'. The novel

differentiated itself from the historical category of forgery by announcing in its form the design of

the author. The word novel can appear on book covers and title pages; the artistic effort or suspense

is prefigured for the reader in a preface or blurb. Once it is stated that this is a text whose

craftsmanship we should acknowledge literary critics will be responsible for the further discussion.

At its beginnings, this new responsibility (historians were the only qualified critics up to the 1750s)

made it possible to publicly disqualify much of the previous fictional production: Both the early-

18th-century roman clef and its fashionable counterpart, the nouvelle historique, had offered

narratives with by and large scandalous historical implications. Historians had discussed them

with a look at facts they had related. The modern literary critic who became responsible for fictions

in the 1750s offered a less scandalous debate: A work is "literature", art, if it has a personal

narrative, heroes to identify with, fictional inventions, style and suspense in short anything that

might be handled with the rather personal ventures of creativity and artistic freedom. It may relate

facts with scandalous accuracy, or distort them; yet one can ignore any such work as worthless if itdoes not try to be an achievement in the new field of literary works[1] it has to compete with

works of art and invention, not with true histories.

Historians reacted and left much of their own previous "medieval" and "early modern" production to

the evaluation of literary critics. New histories discussed public perceptions of the past the

decision that turned them into the perfect platform on which one can question historical liabilities in

the West. Fictions, allegedly an essentially personal subject matter, became, on the other hand, a

field of materials that call for a public interpretation: they became a field of cultural significance to

be explored with a critical and (in the school system) didactic interest in the subjective perceptions

both of artists and their readers.

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[edit]Distinct literary prose

The first "romances" had been verse epics in the Romance language of southern France. Novel(la)s

as those Geoffrey Chaucer presented in his The Canterbury Tales appeared in verse much later. A

number of famous 19th-century fictional narratives such as Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824) and

Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin (1833) competed with the moderne prose novels of their time

and employed verse. It is hence problematic to call prose a decisive criterion.[2] Prose did, however,

become the standard of the modern novel thanks to a number of advantages it had over verse

once the question of the carrier medium was solved.

Prose is easier to translate. As rather intimate and informal language prose won the market of

European fiction in the 15th century, a time at which books first became widely available, and

immediately developed a special style with models both in Greek and Roman histories and the

traditions of verse narratives wherever an elevated style was needed. The development of a distinct

fictional language was crucial for the genre that didn't aim at forging history but at works readers

would actually identify and appreciate as fictions.

This is for the early modern period closely connected to the development of elegance in the belles

lettres. With the beginning of the 16th century the printed market had created a special demand for

books that were neither simply published for the non academic audience nor explicitly scientific

literature but. The belles lettres became this field as a compound of genres including modern

history and science in the vernaculars, personal memoirs, present political scandal, fiction and

poetry. Prose fiction was in this wider spectrum soon the driving force creating the distinct style as it

allowed the artistic experiment and the personal touch of the author who could market his or her

style as a fashion. Verse, rhetoric and science were by contrast highly restricted areas. Fictional

prose remained close to everyday language, to the private letter, to the art of "gallant" conversation,

to the personal memoir and travelogue.[3]

18th-century authors eventually criticized the France ideals of elegance the belles lettres had

promoted. A less aristocratic style of English reformed novels became the ideal in the 1740s. The

requirements of style changed again in the 1760s when prose fiction became part of the newly

formed literary production. The more normal it became to open novels with a simple statement of

their fictionality (for example by labelling them as "a novel"), the less interesting it became to

imitate true histories with an additional touch of style. Novels of the 1760s such as Sterne's Tristram

Shandy began to explore prose fiction as an experimental field. Novels of the ensuing romantic

period played with the fragment and open-endedness. Modern late-19th-century and early-20th-

century fiction continued the deconstruction attacking the clear author-reader communication and

developing models of texts to be evaluated as such. Modern literary criticism acted in the

experimental field as a constant provider of historical models. Authors who write fiction gain critical

attention as soon as they search a position in future histories of literature, whether as innovators or

traditionalists. The situation is in a historical perspective new: An awareness of traditions has

only grown after the publication of Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances (1670). It has reached

the public only with greater impact since the 1830s.

[edit]Media requirements: Paper and print

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The evolution of prose fiction required cheap carrier media. Unlike verse, prose can hardly be

remembered with precision. Oral traditions had helped prose narrators with stock narrative patterns

as employed in fairy tales[4] and with complex plot structures, whose point they could only reach if

they told the story correctly (the novels of Boccaccio and Chaucer share this mode of construction

with modern jokes, the shortest form of prose narratives still circulating in oral traditions).

Extended prose fictions needed paper[citation needed] to preserve their complex compositions.

Parchment had been available before the 1450s[citation needed], but remained too expensive to be

used for histories one would read as a private diversion. Parchment was used for prestigious and

presentable volumes of verse epics their owners would have recited on festive occasions (see the

Troilus and Criseyde illustration below). Prose was otherwise the language of scientific books.

Parchments would in their case be bought by libraries. The situation changed in the course of the

14th and 15th centuries when prose legends became fashionable among the female urban elite. The

fact that the new audience would read these books again and again for inspirational purposes

legitimated the use of parchment in the private context.

The availability of paper as a carrier medium changed the situation for prose fiction. Paper allowed

the production of cheap books one would not necessarily read twice, books one would buy

exclusively for one's private diversion. The modern novel developed with the new carrier medium in

Europe in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. The arrival of the printed book pushed the

generic development as it created a special tension between the privacy of the reading act and the

publicity of the reading material that was sold in larger editions. The formats duodecimo and octavo

(or small quarto in the case of chapbooks) immediately created books one could read privately at

home or in public without the support of a table. To read novels in coffee houses or on journeys

became part of the early modern reading culture.[5] The reader who immerses him- or herself in the

novel with the wish to stay undisturbed (or to be disturbed only with a look at his or her present

reading) is here an early modern precursor of the modern commuter reading a novel or putting on

head phones with the intention to stay private in the public. A special content matter immediately

explored the new reading situations.