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First Edition

Britannica Educational PublishingMichael I. Levy: Executive EditorJ.E. Luebering: Senior ManagerMarilyn L. Barton: Senior Coordinator, Production ControlSteven Bosco: Director, Editorial TechnologiesLisa S. Braucher: Senior Producer and Data EditorYvette Charboneau: Senior Copy EditorKathy Nakamura: Manager, Media AcquisitionKathleen Kuiper: Manager, Arts and Culture

Rosen Educational ServicesHeather M. Moore Niver: EditorNelson Sá: Art DirectorCindy Reiman: Photography ManagerNicole Russo: DesignerMatthew Cauli: Cover DesignIntroduction by Kathleen Kuiper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Prose: literary terms and concepts / edited by Kathleen Kuiper. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (The Britannica guide to literary elements)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-61530-543-8 (eBook)1. Prose literature—History and criticism. I. Kuiper, Kathleen.PN3335.P76 2012808—dc22

2010047949

Cover, pp. 1, 44, 69, 98, 120, 134, 164, 180, 210 Shutterstock.com

CONTENTSIntroduction xii

Chapter 1: Novel 1Elements 4

Plot 4Character 6Scene, or Setting 8

Émile Zola 9Narrative Method and Point of View 10Scope, or Dimension 11Myth, Symbolism, Significance 13

Uses 14Interpretation of Life 14Entertainment or Escape 15Propaganda 16

Harriet Beecher Stowe 17Reportage 18Agent of Change in Language and Thought 18Expression of the Spirit of its Age 20Creator of Lifestyle and Arbiter of Taste 21

Style 21Romanticism 21

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 23Realism 23Naturalism 24Impressionism 25Expressionism 27Avant-Gardism 28

Jorge Luis Borges 29Novel: Terms and Concepts 29

Apprenticeship Novel 29Bildungsroman 29Dime Novel 30Epistolary Novel 31Gothic Novel 32

Ann Radcliffe 32Historical Novel 33I Novel 33Indianista Novel 33New Novel 34Nonfiction Novel 34

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Novel of Manners 35 Jane Austen 35

Novella 36Picaresque Novel 36Psychological Novel 38Roman à Clef 39Sentimental Novel 39Social Problem Novel 40Stream of Consciousness 40Western 41

James Fenimore Cooper 42

Chapter 2: Science Fiction 44The World of Science Fiction 44The Antecedents of Science Fiction 47Proto-Science Fiction and Jules Verne 47Classic British Science Fiction 50Mass Markets and Juvenile Science Fiction 50The “Golden Age” of Science Fiction 51Soviet Science Fiction 52Major Science Fiction Themes 53

Utopias and Dystopias 53Alternative Societies 55Sex and Gender 56

Ursula K. Le Guin 57Alien Encounters 58Space Travel 60Time Travel 63Alternate Histories and Parallel Universes 64High Technologies 65

Science Fiction: Terms and Concepts 66Fantasy 66

J.K. Rowling 67Hugo Awards 68Nebula Awards 68

Chapter 3: Fable, Parable, and Allegory 69

Allegory and Myth 69The Allegorical Mode 70 John Bunyan 70

Fable 71

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Parable 71Derivation of the Terms 71

Objectives of the Fable 71Objectives of the Parable 72

Allegory 72Diversity of Forms 73Diversity of Media 75Allegory and Cosmology 77Development of the Fable in the West 78

Beast Epic 78 George Orwell 79

Influence of Jean de La Fontaine 80Development of the Parable in the West 80Development of the Allegory in the West 81

Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) 82The Greeks 82Blending of Rival Systems: the Middle Ages 83The Renaissance 85The Modern Period 86

Allegorical Literature in the East 88India 89China 89Japan 90

Fable, Allegory, and Parable: Terms and Concepts 90

Bestiary 90Dream Allegory 93Emblem Book 93Exemplum 94Personification 94Proverb 95Reynard the Fox 96

Chapter 4: Romance 98The Component Elements 99

Style and Subject Matter 99Developing Psychological Awareness 100Sources and Parallels 101

Geoffrey of Monmouth 101The Marvelous 102The Setting 102

Medieval Verse Romances 103

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Arthurian Romance and the Matter of Britain 104The Influence of Chrétien de Troyes 105

Chrétien de Troyes 105Love as a Major Theme 106

Medieval Prose Romances 108Arthurian Themes 108Structure 109

Later Developments 110The Spread and Popularity of Romance Literature 111The Decline of Romance 111The 18th-Century Romantic Revival 112

Romance: Terms and Concepts 113Alexander Romance 113Chanson de Geste 114Chantefable 115Courtly Love 115Hellenistic Romance 117Romance of ‘Antar 117

Chapter 5: Saga 120Nonfictional Saga Literature 121

Translations 121Native Historical Accounts 122

Legendary and Historical Fiction 122Kings’ Sagas 123Legendary Sagas 124Sagas of Icelanders 125

Njáls Saga 127Saga: Terms and Concepts 127

Fornaldarsogur 127Hero 127Heroic Prose 128Legend 129

Scéla 130Vikings 130

Chapter 6: Short Story 134Analysis of the Genre 134Origins 137

From Egypt to India 137

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The Greeks 139Middle Ages, Renaissance, and After 140

Proliferation of Forms 140Refinement 141Spreading Popularity 142

Decline of Short Fiction 143Emergence of the Modern Short Story 144

The 19th Century 144The “Impressionist” Story 147Respect for the Story 148French Writers 148Russian Writers 149

Nikolay Gogol 151The 20th Century and After 151Short Story: Terms and Concepts 154

Conte 154Detective Story 154Dilemma Tale 157Frame Story 158In Medias Res 158Interior Monologue 158

Virginia Woolf 159Irony 160Literary Sketch 160Maqāmah 161

Al-Hamadhānī 162Mystery Story 162

Chapter 7: Satire 164Historical Definitions 165Influence of Horace and Juvenal 166 Jonathan Swift 168Structure of Verse Satire 168The Satiric Spirit 169Satirical Literature 170The Satirist, the Law, and Society 172Satire: Terms and Concepts 174

Anatomy 175Burlesque 175Fool’s Literature 176

Sebastian Brant 176Lampoon 176

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Parody 177Pasquinade 178Travesty 178

Chapter 8: Biography 180Historical Aspects 180Psychological Aspects 183Ethical Aspects 184Aesthetic Aspects 184Kinds of Biography 185

Firsthand Knowledge 185 James Boswell 186

Research 186Informal Autobiography 190

Anne Frank 192Formal Autobiography 193Specialized Forms of Autobiography 195

History of Biography in the West 195Antiquity 195The Middle Ages 196The Renaissance 197The 17th and 18th Centuries 199The 19th Century 200The 20th Century and After 202

Other Literatures 204Biography: Terms and Concepts 205

Confession 205Diary 206Hagiography 207Memoir 208Roman à Clef 208

Simone de Beauvoir 209Table Talk 209

Chapter 9: Literary Criticism 210Functions 211Historical Development 213

Antiquity 213The Medieval Period 214The Renaissance 215Neoclassicism and its Decline 215

Ancients and Moderns 217

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Romanticism 217The Late 19th Century 218The 20th Century and After 219

Criticism: Terms and Concepts 224Affective Fallacy 224Archetype 224Cultural Studies 225Deconstruction 225Explication de Texte 227Freudian Criticism 227Intentional Fallacy 227Narodnost 228Narratology 228

Roland Barthes 229New Criticism 229New Humanism 230Platonic Criticism 230Poststructuralism 231The Sublime 231

Conclusion 232

Glossary 233Bibliography 235Index 237

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An invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human

experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting, is called a novel. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical—to name only some of the more important ones.

The novel is a genre of fiction, and fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written word, rep-resentations of human life that instruct or divert or both. The various forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate categories than as a continuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such brief form as the anecdote at one end of the scale and the longest conceivable novel at the other. When any piece of fiction is long enough to con-stitute a whole book, as opposed to a mere part of a book, then it may be said to have achieved novelhood. But this state admits of its own quantitative categories, so that a relatively brief novel may be termed a novella (or, if the insubstanti-ality of the content matches its brevity, a novelette), and a particularly long novel may overflow the banks of a single volume and become a roman-fleuve, or river novel. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre.

The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus, a late variant of novus,

Novel

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The shelves of libraries around the world support printed books on a vast assortment of subjects, written in a great variety of styles. Comstock/Thinkstock

and palaces. There is more low fornica-tion than princely combat. Gods do not move the action. The dialogue is homely rather than aristocratic. It was, in fact, out of the need to find—in the period of Roman decline—a literary form that was anti-epic in both substance and language that the first prose fiction of Europe seems to have been conceived. When the most memorable character in Petronius is a nouveau riche vulgarian and the hero of Lucius Apuleius is turned into a don-key, nothing farther from epic can easily be imagined.

The medieval chivalric romance (from a popular Latin word, probably Romanice, meaning written in the ver-nacular, not in traditional Latin) restored a kind of epic view of humans—though now as heroic Christians, not heroic pagans. At the same time, it bequeathed its name to the later genre of continental literature, the novel, which is known in French as roman, in Italian as romanzo, etc. (The English term romance, how-ever, carries a pejorative connotation.) But that later genre achieved its first great flowering in Spain at the beginning of the 17th century in an antichivalric comic masterpiece—the Don Quixote of Cervantes, which, on a larger scale than the Satyricon or The Golden Ass, contains many of the elements that have been expected from prose fiction ever since. Novels have heroes, but not in any classi-cal or medieval sense. As for the novelist, he must, in the words of the contempo-rary British-American poet W.H. Auden,

meaning “new”), so that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive denotes historically the parent form. The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio’s Decameron, each of which exemplifies the etymology well enough. The stories are little new things, novelties, freshly minted diver-sions, toys. They are not reworkings of known fables or myths, and they lack weight and moral earnestness. It is to be noted that, despite the high example of novelists of the most profound serious-ness, such as Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, the term novel still, in some quarters, carries overtones of lightness and frivolity. And it is pos-sible to descry a tendency to triviality in the form itself. The ode or symphony seems to possess an inner mechanism that protects it from aesthetic or moral corruption, but the novel can descend to shameful commercial depths of senti-mentality or pornography. This section endeavours to consider the novel not solely in terms of great art but also as an all-purpose medium catering to all the strata of literacy.

Such early ancient Roman fiction as Petronius’s Satyricon of the 1st century ce and Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass of the 2nd century contain many of the popular elements that distinguish the novel from the epic poem. In the fictional works, the medium is prose, the events described are unheroic, and the settings are streets and taverns, not battlefields

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known as the story or plot. This is frequently conceived by the novelist in very simple terms, a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope: for example, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) might have been conceived as “a mis-anthrope is reformed through certain magical visitations on Christmas Eve,” or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as “a young couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice,” or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) as “a young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his punishment.” The detailed working out of the nuclear idea requires much ingenuity, because the plot of one novel is expected to be somewhat differ-ent from that of another, and there are very few basic human situations for the novelist to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from fiction or biography—a form of theft sanctioned by William Shakespeare—but the novelist has to produce what look like novelties.

The example of Shakespeare is a reminder that the ability to create an interesting plot, or even any plot at all, is not a prerequisite of the imaginative writer’s craft. At the lowest level of fiction, plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock responses of concern and excitement in the reader. The reader’s inter-est may be captured at the outset by the promise of conflicts or mysteries or frustrations that will eventually be resolved, and he will gladly—so strong is his desire to be moved or entertained—suspend criticism of even the most trite modes of resolution. In the least sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied are stringently physical, and the denouement often comes in a sort of triumphant violence. Serious fiction prefers its plots to be based on psychological situations,

Become the whole of boredom, subject toVulgar complaints like love, among the JustBe just, among the Filthy filthy too,And in his own weak person, if he can,Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.

The novel attempts to assume those burdens of life that have no place in the epic poem and to see individuals as unheroic, unredeemed, imperfect, even absurd. This is why there is room among its practitioners for writers of hard-boiled detective thrillers such as the 20th-century American writer Mickey Spillane or of sentimental melodramas such as the prolific 19th-century English novelist Mrs. Henry Wood, but not for someone of the unremitting elevation of outlook of a John Milton.

ELEMENTS

One of the principal ways to analyze a novel is by examining the myriad devices of which it is built. At the very least, these consist of plot, character, scene (or set-ting), narrative method and point of view, scope (or dimension), and myth, symbol, and significance.

Plot

The novel is propelled through its hun-dred or thousand pages by a device

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Dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell (the author’s sister) for the first edition of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, published by the Hogarth Press in 1927. Between the Covers Rare Books, Merchantville, NJ

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do to hold a novel together—raw action, the hidden syllogism of the mystery story, prolonged solipsist contemplation—so long as the actualities or potentialities of human life are credibly expressed, with a consequent sense of illumination, or some lesser mode of artistic satisfaction, on the part of the reader.

Character

The inferior novelist tends to be preoccu-pied with plot. To the superior novelist the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully selected expe-rience, are the chief fascination. Without character it was once accepted that there could be no fiction. In the period since World War II, the creators of what has come to be called the French nouveau roman (i.e., New Novel) have deliberately demoted the human element, claiming the right of objects and processes to the writer’s and reader’s prior attention. Thus, in books termed chosiste (literally “thing-ist”), they make the furniture of a room more important than its human incum-bents. This may be seen as a transitory protest against the long predominance of character in the novel, but, even on the popular level, there have been indica-tions that readers can be held by things as much as by characters. Henry James could be vague in The Ambassadors (1903) about the provenance of his chief character’s wealth, but if he wrote today he would have to give his readers a tour around the factory or estate. The popular-ity of much undistinguished but popular

and its climaxes come in new states of awareness—chiefly self-knowledge—on the parts of the major characters.

Melodramatic plots, plots depen-dent on coincidence or improbability, are sometimes found in even the most ele-vated fiction. E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is an example of a classic British novel with such a plot. But the novelist is always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings, no ends, and very few simple motives for action) or to construct an artifact as well balanced and economi-cal as a table or chair. Because he is an artist, the claims of art, or artifice, fre-quently prevail.

There are, however, ways of con-structing novels in which plot may play a desultory part or no part at all. The tradi-tional picaresque novel—a novel typically with a rogue as its central character—like Alain Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715) or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), depends for movement on a succession of chance inci-dents. In the works of Virginia Woolf, the consciousness of the characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device, some-times provides all the fictional material. Marcel Proust’s great roman-fleuve, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time), has a metaphysical framework derived from the time theories of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and it moves toward a moment of truth that is intended to be literally a revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly, any scheme will

engulf the reader, subscribed to by the great novelists of France and Russia. The whole nature of human identity remains in doubt, and writers who voice that doubt—like the French exponents of the nouveau roman Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, as well as many others—are in effect rejecting a purely romantic view of character. This view imposed the author’s image of himself—the only human image he properly possessed—on the rest of the human world. For the unsophisticated reader of fiction, any created personage with a firm position in time–space and the most superficial parcel of behavioral (or even sartorial) attributes will be taken for a character. Though the critics may regard it as heretical, this tendency to accept a character is in conformity with the usages of real life. The average per-son has at least a suspicion of his own complexity and inconsistency of makeup, but he sees the rest of the world as com-posed of much simpler entities. The result is that novels whose characters are created out of the author’s own introspec-tion are frequently rejected as not “true to life.” But both the higher and the lower orders of novel readers might agree in condemning a lack of memorability in the personages of a work of fiction, a fail-ure on the part of the author to seem to add to the reader’s stock of remembered friends and acquaintances. Characters that seem, on recollection, to have a life outside the bounds of the books that con-tain them are usually the ones that earn their creators the most regard. Depth of psychological penetration, the ability to

fiction has nothing to do with its wooden characters. Machines, procedures, and organizations draw the reader. The suc-cess of Ian Fleming’s British spy stories in the 1960s had much to do with James Bond’s car, gun, and preferred way of mix-ing a martini.

But the true novelists remain cre-ators of characters—prehuman, such as those in William Golding’s Inheritors (1955); animal, as in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927) or Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903); caricatures, as in much of Dickens; or complex and unpredictable entities, as in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Henry James. The reader may be prepared to tolerate the most wanton-seeming stylistic tricks and formal difficulties because of the intense interest of the central characters in nov-els as diverse as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67).

It is the task of literary critics to create a value hierarchy of fictional character, placing the complexity of the Shakespearean view of humanity—as found in the novels of Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad—above creations that may be no more than simple personifications of some single characteristic, like some of those by Dickens. It frequently hap-pens, however, that the common reader prefers surface simplicity—easily mem-orable cartoon figures like Dickens’s never-despairing Mr. Micawber and devi-ous Uriah Heep—to that wider view of personality, in which character seems to

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