Development Of Novel As a Literary Form In England

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Development Of Novel As a Literary Form In England Submitted by nazmamusharraf on December 27, 2011 Category: English Words: 465 | Pages: 2 Views: 1166 Report this Essay Development of the novel in England probably started with the novel's forerunners in Europe, widely read by English writers at the beginning of the 18thC--chiefly, works like Francois Rabelais'Gargantua (1534) and Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605). The key to the development of the novel in English literary history is a concept known as verisimilitude, that is, the writer's ability to make his story true to life using characters and events everyone can recognize as existing in the real world. Daniel Defoe is the most likely candidate for the first true novelist in English literature, using fictitious characters, generally from lower walks of life, and loose narrative structures inRobinson Crusoe (1719, based on a historical character), Moll Flanders (1722), and Roxana (1724). Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) introduced allegory (something in the text refers to a greater meaning outside the text) but kept the allegorical elements believable because Swift's You must Login to view the entire essay. If you are not a member yet, Sign Up for free! use of verisimilitude allowed his characters to act in ways every reader could recognize. By the mid-18thC, writers like Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett had written a number of novels, using different narrative techniques to advance the plot, that provided readers with a realistic depiction of life in England. Perhaps the greatest of these is Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) because it demonstrates Fielding's extraordinary skill in creating true-to-life characters from all walks of life and a highly-intricate plot that wraps up neatly at the end of the novel. The 18thC English novel, almost without

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