1. Development of the English Novel

THE HISTORICAL origins and development of the English novel, its relations to continental assembly, the tantalise question of the definition of the form itselfall these be matters in any case complex to be handled here. The present picture discussion do-nothing only treat, and by dangerously abundant generalization, three or four of the outstanding characteristics of British prose fiction of the last ii hundred years, and can suggest preferably than formulate those apt and moral traits of the national character which are thus indicated. From this even out of view, however, one matter of write up is significant,namely, that the novel first emerged as a definite literary type in the ordinal nose candy, which laid the foundations in like manner for the social sciences and which was, more than than any previous(prenominal) century, an age of criticism and reflection. The momentum of the earlier renaissance, with its soaring imagination, its fulgurant poetry, its passion for the fullness of aesthetical experience, had long since expended itself, leaving to the mid-seventeenth century a dangerous inheritance of libertinism on the one side of meat and sectarian rapture on the other.

The disastrous conflict amongst these two extremes of character produced, by way of reaction, a mood of moderation and reasonableness, equally unwilling to sensualism and to mystic exaltation, more concerned, on the whole, with life as it has been and as it is than with life as it might be; a frame of mind doubting of fine-spun theories, but profoundly humanistic, in that it held with Pope that the pr oper mull of mankind is man. Such was, at i! ts best, the temper of the eighteenth century, and it was in this intellectual atmosphere that the English novel had its beginnings. Further, in the eighteenth century, England was undergoing an economic and industrial novelty which awakened new aspirations in, and subject new opportunities to, the great hurrying middle class. (The merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, in the Spectator club, is a catch much...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

If you want to get a full essay, visit our page: write my paper