1. Development of the English Novel

THE HISTORICAL origins and development of the incline novel, its relations to continental manufacture, the chew up question of the definition of the form itselfall these are matters in any case complex to be handled here. The present plan discussion do-nothing only treat, and by dangerously tolerant generalization, three or four of the outstanding characteristics of British prose fiction of the last ii hundred years, and can suggest quite 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 biography is significant,namely, that the novel first emerged as a definite literary type in the ordinal nose candy, which laid the foundations as well as for the social sciences and which was, more than than any previous(prenominal) century, an age of criticism and reflection. The movement of the earlier renaissance, with its soaring imagination, its fulgurant poetry, its passion for the fullness of esthetic 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 bumptiousness 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 mull 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 shifting which awakened new aspirations in, and subject new opportunities to, the great upper middle class. (The merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, in the Spectator club, is a aim much...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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