​The Development of the Novel in the English and American Traditions 

You are the very picture of what an English student aims to be: You read every day, cuddled up on a vintage armchair. Maybe you drink tea (apparently no other English student is as caffeine-addicted as I am) and light a special candle. You’ve read the contemporaries, the classics, maybe you’re more familiar with the literary canon than the casual reader. You never once wondered, despite reading novel after novel, what the origins of the form could possibly be.

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To delve into the history of the novel as a form and a genre we must first ask ourselves what a novel is. Surely you know one when you see it, but can you define it? According to Vilashini Coopan in her article “The Novel as Genre,” “To attempt to define the novel as a genre is risky... The object of the analysis is so monstrously indefinite, so historically long and geographically broad, so diverse in its modes (realism, sentimentalism, naturalism, magical realism, postmodernism, localism, globalism), and so cannibal in its appetites that to hazard a taxonomic description is surely to court being swallowed by the object itself,” (25). Ralph W. Rader, a major theorist of the novel as a genre, says that “a novel is a work which offers the reader a focal illusion of characters acting autonomously as if in the world of real experience within a subsidiary awareness of an underlying constructive authorial purpose which gives their story an implicit significance and affective force which real world [sic] experience does not have,” (72). On another hand, Maurice Z. Shroder says that “An adequate definition of the novel would, of course, have to be totally comprehensive, exhaustive, and infallible. It would have to borrow at once from the history of literature, the study of external form, and the study of the fictional matter of novels in general,” (292). If you prefer, we can also turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica to define the novel. Anthony Burgess claims that the novel is “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. 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.”  

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It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that there are as many definitions of the novel as there are novelists. The major commonality between the definitions is that a novel is a work of fiction. The novel is expansive and cannibalistic, meaning that it is many things at once.  

Even the taxonomy of singularity fails, as witness the narrative of the genre’s eighteenth-century origins in the fact/fiction tension, … or the account of the novel’s branching evolution into epistolary, gothic, and realist modes, the latter tending, on the one hand, to the historical … and, on the other, to the domestic … or the tale of modernism’s wholesale capture of the novel by, and for, language. The fact is that the novel was never fully tamed, never adequately contained within a definition, never readily consigned to this or that period of history (Coopan 32). 

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Indeed, the novel is, apparently, too many things to define wholly or succinctly. An incomplete definition might simply be, “a work of narrative fiction that is long enough to be a book.”  

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The origins of the novel are as muddy as its definitions. Some, like William C. Spengemann, firmly believe that the first novel was Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, written by Aphra Behn in 1688. This is about 50 years before others, like Rader, believe that Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson was written. According to Rader, prior to 1740, there was a “nonexistence” of the form. These are, of course, English novels. The first American novel has a similar air of mystery. Some claim that Oroonoko, along with being the very first novel, is also the first American novel. Coopan says that it was the first novel in the English tradition (26). Alexander Medlicott Jr., however, claims that “Once a political separation between England and her American colonies had been realized in the final years of the eighteenth century, it was several decades before America's authors were able (and willing, it would appear) to cut the literary cord which bound them so tightly to the mother country,” (461). Medlicott believes that The Female Marine, written by Lucy Brewer in 1815 (who had a slew of other aliases), marked the first American novel.  

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The earliest novels, if we take Oroonoko for example, do not look like a typical formula novel you would pick up at Barnes & Noble. It might be fair to call Oroonoko a proto-novel. As Spengemann puts it,  

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Reading Oroonoko … in the light of all the prose fiction produced over the last three centuries, we tend automatically to think of Behn's work as a novel and then … dismiss it as a very imperfect example of the genre. Although perhaps unavoidable, this ahistorical view begs its own question: why should we so readily attach the name “novel” to a work written at a time when the various things we understand by that word—the form itself, the world it describes, its peculiar language, the readership to whom it speaks—did not yet exist, were only in the process, so to speak, of being invented? (388) 

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We do, however, consider it a novel. Behn created Oroonoko by combining Romance and The Brief True Relation, both common in her time of writing. Romance was similar to the novel in that it is a narrative story, but Romances involve a mysterious, adventurous, or spiritual storyline focused on a quest (not always a quest for love). The Brief True Relation was used as a way to inform the Old World (i.e.. England) of the New World. The combination of these two forms created something new. Spengemann says, “by telling her romantic tale in this form she stumbled, however unwillingly, upon a new way of writing fiction—a combination of language, structure, theme, narrative mode, and a vision of human history that we now associate with ‘the novel,’” (409). 

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“Well,” you might ask, “what did early novels look like?” Again, taking Oroonoko as an example, we can see patterns that are found in even today’s novels. To paraphrase Spengemann, Oroonoko contains conflict between antiquity and modernity, a hero in unbecoming and violent circumstances, children leaving their parents in search of a new life, [something about character development], poetic language, an attitude of nostalgia for the past and anticipation of the future, and an allegiance to the audience as well as the novel’s own secrets (413). Moving forward into the 1700s, the formula novel contained, “parental warnings; headlong-heedless love; seduction by a dastardly villain; flight through storms; temporary sanctuary with a kindly protectress; ensnarement by a wretched deceiver; a pitiful death of an unwanted child; sermons and lectures on moral fiber; and years of depravity and disillusionment as a fallen woman. These are the ingredients of the formula novel of the time,” (Medlicott 464). Novels of this time were didactic —in other words, they were meant to teach something. In the 1800s, the satirical novel was on the rise, and the novel began to shift away from didacticism, aiming instead to amuse its audience. Like Behn’s early novel, novels of the 1800s were composite, blending styles, themes, and techniques, such as romance, memoir, pseudo-history, picaresque tale, autobiography, and sermon (471). Fast forward once again to the late 1800s and early 1900s, there is another shift in fiction. According to Shroder, novels had a “the tendency either to become more emphatically psychological, to look for ironies deeper within the individual sensibility, or to become more openly "cosmic," to see all men as blind pretenders and truth as the prerogative of an omniscient god,” (306). It is around this time where we begin to see such familiar names as Virginia Woolf, and her stream of consciousness writing style, Henry James and his attention to point of view, Andre Gidé and Marcel Proust and their subtle analyses of the un/conscious mind. All continue to impact modern novels. 

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Now, several pages deep into Google Scholar, several open books on the novel surrounding you, you are still confused about the muddled, seemingly nonlinear history of the novel as form and genre. The truth is that the novel is simply untamable, and the more we try to define it, the more forms the novel consumes. Shroder says that “as the novel becomes more thoroughly comic or more thoroughly tragic, it passes beyond irony and beyond realism into a new area of fictive expression,” (305). What new areas of fictive expression will you explore?