Chivalric Romance and Novella Collections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter argues that the sixteenth-century novella collection and chivalric romance have much in common. However, their length, status as translations, and multiple authorships have rendered their comparison difficult and have limited their role in studies of pre-novelistic fiction until relatively recently. The chapter characterizes their relationship as ‘rhetorical’, because consideration of the two genres has long been dictated by their staged opposition in the traditional, dualistic narrative of the novel's origin. This narrative imagines a struggle between the past-ness and absurdities of romance and the present-ness and realism of the novel as anticipated in the early modern novella and the closely related picaresque tale. Hence, they possess an interlocking yet uncomfortable — even antagonistic — rhetorical relationship in the literary history of the novel in English.

Bunyan and Religious Allegory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Davies
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter re-examines John Bunyan's religious allegories, and in particular The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), as works that complicate what might be thought of as novelistic habits of reading and writing. It seeks to approach them not simply as precursors to the novel but as radically different kinds of fiction. One might wish to treat Bunyan's allegories as ‘entertainment machines’ similar to other kinds of early modern literature, such as chivalric romance or the rogue biography, but they resist and arguably seek to reform ‘the fiction reading impulse’. To this degree, Bunyan's major allegorical works are sometimes like novels and at the same time nothing like them. Should Bunyan still hold a place in the history of the novel, it could be despite rather than because of the narrative methods he adopts.

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

The Orchard of Syon: An Introduction

Traditio ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sister Mary Denise
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spiritual Climate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

By some inexplicable accident of literary history, The Orchard of Syon, in the nearly five hundred years of its existence, has not found its critical editor, nor is there any study of it available to readers. The first to rescue it from oblivion was Sir Richard Sutton, steward of Syon Monastery in the early sixteenth century, who, as Wynkyn de Worde informs us, found it ‘in a corner by it selfe’ and deemed it worthy of costly publication. Although it belongs to a body of medieval literature which has been in recent years the object of much critical research by medievalists, the work has, so far as modern readers are concerned, continued for over four centuries to lie ‘in a corner by it selfe.’ The energetic surge of vernacular devotional prose in the fourteenth century, not only in England, but in Italy, Germany, and Flanders — countries whose spiritual climate must have been especially favorable to mysticism — did not recede in the fifteenth century. Following upon the age of Chaucer, this century may seem to some present-day scholars literarily poor and unproductive, but it was a great age of English prose; an age, that is, when translations and experiments with original prose in the vernacular were building on the past, borrowing from other languages to meet the needs of the present, and shaping the prose of the future. The Orchard of Syon is an important specimen of this emerging prose, as well as of current devotional literature. Its connection with Syon Monastery, renowned in the history of England and of the Church, gives it added prestige.

Ralph Rader on the Literary History of the Novel

Narrative ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Foltz
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
History Of

The current notion of the “death of the novel” is a midcentury construction at once inherited from modernism and designed to obscure the novel’s affinity with new forms of moving image storytelling. Against this critical rubric, I suggest that contemporary literary history is already enmeshed in a history of evolving media—which is to say, an ongoing record of generic distress. There has not been only one death of the novel, stretched out over a century from modernism to the present; for the “death of the novel” is not a historical event. The literary history of the novel after film cannot be drawn in a straight line, in part because that history is not simply literary in nature. What has it meant for writers to discover that film and television may no longer be conceived as media foreign to the novel but are instead crucial pieces of its “hideous furniture”?

Fiction and the Origins of Print

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Trade

This chapter is concerned with the far-reaching effects of printing, especially where these resonate with developments associated with the history of the novel. Broader reading communities and the new commerce in books are described in terms of the long and complex processes of change that made them possible. The chapter also attends to those aspects of print culture that were largely unprecedented: changes to the institution of authorship and to the accessibility of texts. Finally, the chapter has a recurring interest in the importance of the pan-European trade in medieval books of Latin. The dominant centres of that trade had always been European; the printers at Venice and Antwerp who made so many books for English readers in the early modern period did as scribes and stationers of Paris and Bologna had done before them.

The Arabic Novel and History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Allen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between the Arabic novel and history within the context of the Arabic-speaking world, and in particular the process of producing a literary history of the novel genre written in Arabic. It first considers the early development of the novel genre in Arabic as part of a cultural movement that gained impetus in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the interplay of two cultural forces: the importation of Western ideas (including literary genres) and the role of the premodern Arab-Islamic cultural heritage in each subregion. It then discusses examples of narrative from the premodern heritage of Arabic literature before turning to the history of the Arabic novel. The chapter also presents examples of the Arabic historical novel, one of which is Sālim Ḥimmīsh’s Al-‘Allāma (2001, The Polymath).

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Julianne Werlin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
Century Literature

This book is an experiment in conjoining two approaches to early modern English literature which, despite a seemingly obvious affinity, are rarely pursued together: the material history of texts and Marxist historical analysis. No trend in scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature in the past three decades has been more important than the rise of research on media, not confined to the history of the book or even manuscript, but encompassing communications as a whole. A wide variety of phenomena, including but by no means limited to methods of papermaking and bookbinding, readers’ habits of annotation, and the development of the postal system, have been shown to be relevant to early modern textual and literary history....

Inventing the Novel

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Bracht Branham
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Menippean Satire ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
I And Thou ◽  
History Of

Bakhtin as a philosopher and a student of the novel is intent upon the novel’s role in the history of consciousness. His project fails if he is wrong about the dialogic nature of consciousness or the cultural centrality of the novel as the only discourse that can model human consciousness and its intersubjective character. Inventing the Novel is an argument in four stages: the Introduction surveys Bakhtin’s life and his theoretical work in the 1920s, which grounded his work on the novel, as investigated in following chapters. Chapter 1 sketches Bakhtin’s view of literary history as an agonistic dialogue of genres, concluding with his claim that the novel originates as a new way of evaluating time. Chapter 2 explores Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes: how do forms of time and space in ancient fiction delimit the possible representation of the human? Chapter 3 assesses Bakhtin’s poetics of genre in his account of Menippean satire as crucial in the history of the novel. Chapter 4 uses Petronius to address the prosaics of the novel, exploring Bakhtin’s account of how novelists of “the second stylistic line” orchestrate the babble of voices expressive of an era into “a microcosm of heteroglossia,” focusing it through the consciousness of characters “on the boundary” between I and thou. Insofar as this analysis succeeds, it evinces the truth of Bakhtin’s claim that the role of Petronius’s Satyrica in the history of the novel is “immense.”

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