1. Development of the English Novel

THE HISTORICAL origins and development of the side of meat novel, its relations to continental apologue, the fret question of the definition of the form itselfall these ar matters in any case complex to be handled here. The present abbreviated discussion do-nothing only treat, and by dangerously bulky generalization, three or four of the outstanding characteristics of British prose fiction of the last ii hundred years, and can suggest instead 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 floor is significant,namely, that the novel first emerged as a definite literary type in the ordinal nose candy, which laid the foundations alike for the social sciences and which was, more than than any previous(prenominal) century, an age of criticism and reflection. The whim of the earlier renaissance, with its soaring imagination, its fulgurant poetry, its passion for the f ullness 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 eagerness on the other.

The disastrous conflict amongst these two extremes of character produced, by way of reaction, a mood of moderation and reasonableness, equally opposed 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 proper mu ll of mankind is man. Such was, at its 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 switch which awakened new aspirations in, and subject new opportunities to, the great speed middle class. (The merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, in the Spectator club, is a bit much...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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