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Novel
A novel (from French nouvelle, "new") is an extended fictional narrative in prose. Down into the 18th century, the word referred specifically to short fictions of love and intrigue as opposed to romances—epic-length works about love and adventures. Having become one of the major literary genres over the past 200 years the novel is today the object of discussions demanding artistic merits, a specific literary style and a deeper meaning than a true story of the same content could claim to have.
The 19th century and the Novel as the object of great Discussions
At the beginning of the 17th century the novel had been a genre of realism fighting the romance with its wild fantasies. The novel had turned to scandal, then it had been reformed over the last decades of the 18th century. Fiction eventually became the most honourable field of literature. A wave of novels of fantasy culminated this development at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century. Sensibility was heightened in these novels. Women, overwrought and prone to imagining worlds beyond their appointed one, became the heroines of the new world of "romances" and "Gothic novels" creating stories in distant times and places. Renaissance Italy was a favourite of the gothic novel.
The classic Gothic novel is Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). As in other Gothic novels, the notion of the sublime is central. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was awful (awe-inspiring) and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. The characters and landscapes of the Gothic rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine the great exception. The "beautiful" heroine's susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hyper-sensibility.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the overwrought emotions of sensibility, as expressed through the Gothic sublime, had run their course. Jane Austen wrote a Gothic novel parody titled Northanger Abbey (1803), reflecting the death of the Gothic novel. Moreover, while sensibility did not disappear, it was less valued. Austen introduced a different style of writing—the comedy of manners. However, her novels often are not only funny, but also scathingly critical of the restrictive, rural culture of the early 19th century. Her best known novel, Pride and Prejudice (1811), is her happiest, and has been a blueprint for much subsequent romantic fiction; her other novels feature heroines for whom the modern reader has little sympathy, and may dislike.
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