What is fiction? part I; the novel in historical context.

What is fiction?

Fiction is almost always prose narrative--it tells a story in prose: for the purposes of this course, non-prose writings do not qualify as fiction.
Fiction is a lie, but it presents itself as truth: even if the characters and events are historically "real," fiction relates made up stories.
Fiction involves the reader's identification and/or sympathy with a specific primary character or characters—fiction depends upon the reader's caring about the main characters.

According to Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel):

"The novel operates through formal realism: the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its readers with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary. The lowest common denominator of the novel genre as a whole is its formal realism."

And according to J. Paul Hunter (Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction), ten leading characteristics of fiction (novels):

1. Contemporaneity - stories relate a significant "now"—that is, whether set in past, present, or future, novels present a sequence of moments related as if actually occurring at specific moments in time re-enacted each time the novel is read.

2. Credibility and probability - characters have recognizably human traits, even if they are rabbits, hobbits, or barnyard animals; and characters and events are governed by laws like those of the real world—in other words, even in the wildest science fiction and fantasy fiction, fiction presents itself as believable.

3. Familiarity. Fiction generally presents everyday existence and common people—as opposed to many older forms of literature which dealt with the uncommon: kings, princesses, knights, gods and goddesses, etc. The subject of fiction is the common person.

4. Rejection of traditional plots - less stereotypical, less predictable, more fluid, more universal—moves away from recognizable formulas of national heroes (epic), knightly quests (romances), unraveling of mistaken identities resolved in marriage (some Shakespearean comedy, e.g.); more towards original plots/themes that readers can relate to personally

5. Tradition-free language - consciously unliterary in language and style—in common, everyday language, not self-consciously "poetic" language and style of previous "literary" forms.

6. Individualism and subjectivity - intensified consciousness of what selfhood means—the novel concentrates attention on the specific psychology and/or life experiences of individual persons—as opposed to the generic representation of the epic's national hero in Beowulf, for instance.

7. Empathy and vicariousness - readers relate to characters and their situations/plights subjectively—that is, readers sympathize and identify with specific characters, the protagonist(s), most commonly. To an extent, when we read novels we experience the protagonists' lives as if we are living them.

8. Coherence and unity of design - novels present one continuous stream of thematically related action(s), they are more ideologically or thematically coherent than many pre-novelistic forms (see Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, e.g.).

9. Inclusivity, digressiveness, fragmentation, the ability to parenthesize - digressions may relate to narrative centers (the central story-line) with more indirection and complexity than the predictable digressions in older genres (epic similes, e.g.)—novels often include a wide variety of apparent digressions away from the central plotlines.

10. Self-consciousness about innovation and novelty. Novels are often pointedly self-conscious about innovation (on what a novel is in the 1740s in Fielding, e.g.): whereas older literary forms are often pointedly "fixed" in terms of content and structure (the national epic, the 14-line sonnet, the elegiac pastoral, tragedy [drama], etc.), the novel is more pointedly fluid and experimental, subject to new possibilities.

Some pre-novel forms of published writing

- Prose romances/Chivalric romances: adventures of knights, quests, damsels in distress, etc.—e.g. the King Arthur legends
- Poetry, including narrative, story-based forms such as epics and romances
- newspapers/journalism
- religious/philosophical/political/scientific tracts: pamphlets offering information or instruction on a great variety of subjects, including especially "good moral behavior"
- Travel books—descriptions of adventures and places and/or cultures (Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is a fictional "travelogue" of sorts, e.g.)
- Biographies: esp. the lives of criminals and lives of saints
- Tales: folk tales, fables, and fairy tales, like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, e.g.; tales differ from the modern short story in that individual characterization is generally not emphasized, and tales do not especially present themselves as really "real."
- Picaresque narratives—describe the episodic adventures of a picaro, a rogue-figure on the margins of society who survives by relying on his or her wits: a criminal, a beggar, an orphaned child, etc. A picaresque story generally relates a series of discrete, separate episodes that may not combine into the cohesive unity that we expect of most fiction. Picaresque novels, concentrating our sympathy from the outlaw margins of society as they do, usually serve as potent vehicles for pointed criticism of mainstream society.
- Satires: loosely constructed stories that mock or ridicule specific behaviors or institutions--Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock or A Modest Proposal, e.g.

253 main page