Development of FictionThe Historical

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Bruce Clary, McPherson College, McPherson, Kansas

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Three major genres

• Novel – long, unified prose narrative

• Novella – unified prose narrative of 15,000-50,000 words

• Short story – compact, tightly unified prose narrative

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Western biases against fiction

• Verse the privileged genre

• Imaginative literature dangerous

• Through the 18th Century, literature expected to be edifying

• Prose literature especially because it was “common” language, associated with coarseness

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Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”

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Precursors of prose fiction

• Myths

• Epics

• Fables

• Parables

• Romances

• Tales

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1720 1725 1730 1735 1740 1745 1750 1755 1760 1765 1770 1775 1780 1785 1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830 1835

1719Daniel Defoe, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

1722Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

1726Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

1740Samuel Richardson, Pamela

1742Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews

1747Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

1749Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

1759Laurence Stern, Tristram Shandy

1771Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker

1794Ann Radcliff, The Mysteries of Udolpho

1812Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Lengthy fictional narratives written in prose had appeared sporadically before 1700; examples include the stories in Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1351-1353), the English romancer Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1469), and Don Quixote (1605, 1615), by Miguel de Cervantes of Spain. These early precursors aside, most scholars date the birth of the modern novel to the eighteenth century.

Landmarks of the 18th-Century Novel in English

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1820 1825 1830 1835 1840 1845 1850 1855 1860 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915

1818Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

1819Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

1826James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

1839Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

1847Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

1850Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

1851Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

1852Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

1861Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

1872George Eliot, Middlemarch

1879Henry James, Daisy Miller

1884Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

1899Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Landmarks of the 19th-Century Novel in English

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1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030

1819 - 1852

THE PROSE TALE

1820

Washington Irving, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon

1833

Edgar Allan Poe, "A MS. Found in a Bottle"

1837

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-told Tales

1840

Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

1845

Poe, Tales

1846

Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse

1853

Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

1853 - 1920

THE REALISTIC SHORT STORY

1870 - 1900

REGIONAL, or "LOCAL COLOR" STORIES

1877

Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales

1880

Guy de Maupassant, "Ball of Fat"

1894

Kate Chopin, Bayou Folk

1894 - 1930

NATURALISM

1912 - 1945

MODERNISM

1914

James Joyce, Dubliners

1916

Constance Garnett, English Translation of Anton Chekhov's Stories

1919

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

1925

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

1931

William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily"

1946 - 2005

DIVERSE CONTEMPORARY FICTION

1952

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

1955

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Leaf Storm

1975 - 1990

MINIMALISM

1976

Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Historical Development of Modern Short Fiction