Over in GQ, there’s a discussion of the first fictional book. There are a number of contenders (spanning about 3000 years), but some contention over the “novel.”
I understand the first novel to be The Tale of Gengi, and the first western novel to be Don Quixote, and that all prior fiction (Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Gargantua and Pantagruel) is epic poetry or otherwise doesn’t meet the strict definition of “novel.” It’s a relatively new medium, hence its name.
What is the strict, scholarly definition? What’s considered to be the first English language novel? The first American novel?
Although other, earlier fictions are sometimes classified as “novels,” the book most often cited as the first true English-language novel is Daniel Defoe’s ROBINSON CRUSOE.
The definition mentioned above comes from Abel Chevalley’s une fiction en prose d’une certaine étendue and is best-known in the English-speaking world through being quoted in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Its primary attraction is its simplicity:
“if this seems to you unphilosophic will you think of an alternative definition, which will include The Pilgrim’s Progress, Marius the Epicurean, The Adventures of a Younger Son,The Magic Flute, A Journal of the Plague Year, Zuleika Dobson, Rasselas, Ulysses and Green Mansions, or else will give reasons for their exclusion?”[sup]1[/sup]
Forster is discussing techniques used by writers of prose fiction and so wants the term “novel” to refer as widely as possible. But this can lead to problems itself.
Consider, for example, Animal Farm and The Portrait of a Lady. They are both works of fiction, are both in prose and are both over the usual minimum length for a novel ( i.e. 50,000 words) so are both novels by our simple definition. But in terms of intention they are wholly different. Animal Farm is a satire: the characters are not realistic ( indeed, most of them are talking animals and the humans have no depth) and the plot is there to make a wider political point. The Portrait of a Lady is a character study: the characters are realistic people with great depth and the action of the story is very realistic. The latter also makes a much wider use of symbolism and figurative language. If we are aiming to study techniques used by writers, is it really helpful to class these two as the same type of book?
“We have, as usual, no word for a work of prose fiction, so the word “novel” does duty for everything, and thereby loses its only real meaning as the name of a genre.”[sup]2[/sup]
So what genre? The usual formulation is that a novel must be realistic and that its primary theme must be the mental, spiritual or emotional development of the main character. It is important to realise that this is a taxonomic criterion, not an evaluative one. The aim of making it is to allow literary critics to make more precise and more interesting points about novels as a whole, by narrowing the focus of what they are discussing. Animal Farm and Frankenstein are not novels, but that doesn’t make them bad. Or again “We may think Moby-Dick “greater” than The Egoist and yet feel that Meredith’s book is closer to being a typical novel.”[sup]3[/sup]
This leaves us with the historical questions. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature puts it thus: “[Daniel] Defoe did not write the first English novel, but he wrote the first English novel of genius [Robinson Crusoe].”
I must confess that I cannot name the corresponding work of American Literature from memory. I’ll see if I can look it up.
I have no cite, but one of my Lit professors said that the first English language novel was considered to be Pamela by some English author whose name I can’t remember. Or perhaps the first socially acceptable English language novel, because she tied it into the fact that novels were considered “low class” and Pamela was written as a series of letters that carried the plot, and was “publicized” as being an entertaining instruction manual for teaching young ladies to write letters.
OK, this is what I’m wondering about: What was the stigma attached to early novels, and when did they shake this bad reputation? Were novelists considered too lazy to write proper long poetry?