I see your Baron Munchhausen and raise you a Moll Flanders 1722.
Although it’s not really as blatant.
The use of typrography was quite innovative in Tristam Shandy, by Lawrence Sterne, published between 1759 and 1767.
According to my English Lit teacher, it was first used in The Great Gatsby.
Forgot the most important thing of all: the development of the anti-hero in mainstream lit.
There were some folk tales based on less than heroic characters and outright scoundrels, such as Stag-O-Lee and Tom Dula (Dooley). But it didn’t become vogue until the tales of Jesse James reached the East. Then stories of others such as Bonnie and Clyde, Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy apture the American imagination. Al Capone and other gangsters served as the Wild Urban East anti-heroes. Soon even the law-abiding admit to certain flaws. We see influence in shows today such as Firefly.
apture=captured
I take it you’ve never seen Shakespeare’s Scottish play? Let me assure you, MacBeth is far from heroic.
And DrFidelius, it’s indisputable that comic books/graphic novels are literature. Whether they’re good literature is admittedly debateable.
How about the solvable mystery? Poe’s The Murders on the Rue Morgue is generally credited as being the first mystery story, but there, the reader isn’t presented with the essential clues until the final denoument. What was the first mystery where sufficient clues were presented in the body of the work?
If you want to push it up even further, mysteries where the unveiling is set off in some way (blank page between, mirror writing, etc.), so as to give the reader a specific point at which to figure it out.
Another gimmick which I suspect is new: Interactive stories, a la Choose Your Own Adventure.
I’ll see your Macbeth and raise you a Richard III!
And isn’t conversational tone, as mentioned by gex gex, a trademark of Mark Twain?
Reading tours by authors were very popular in the 1800s. I’m thinking of a tour of American literary societies (often women’s clubs) that I know Dickens did in the 1880s, from which he made big money. He wrote an account that was quite critical of the experience. These touring authors were quite the celebrities, and travelled feverishly from town to town.
There’s nothing new under the sun (except maybe for the videotape;)).
**You have the jigsaw puzzle effect from Pulp Fiction **
This was done earlier in The Killing.
**You have the backwards time from Memento **
Betrayal
You have alternate history from Run Lola Run
Last Year At Marienbad
The children’s novel existed before 100 years ago, but almost exclusively as a didactic device designed to teach children proper manners and behavior. The novel written primarily or exclusively for children’s entertainment is a form that was very rare until the 20th century.
I may well be remembering incorrectly, as it’s been a whole lot of years since I studied Poe in HS lit., but wasn’t it “The Purloined Letter” that gets “first mystery story” credit?
Alice in Wonderland?
Indeed, Gex, but that’s about it, and explains part of the book’s enduring appeal: when it arrived it was pretty much sui generis.
Books for young readers’ enjoyment are much more of a 20th-century innovation. Ursula Nordstrom, director/force of nature of Harper Bros’ children’s department from 1940 into the 70s, deserves much credit for recognizing that preachy just wasn’t good enough: her mission was to publish “good books for bad children.” That helped give us Goodnight, Moon; Where the Wild Things Are (she discovered Sendak, who was a 22-year-old window-dresser at FAO Schwartz); The Runaway Bunny; *Charlotte’s Web; * and Harriet the Spy.
Alice isn’t a novel in the strictest sense of the word in that it’s a series of loosely connected vignettes and doesn’t contain a central story arc. It is, however one of the prominent examples of children’s literature written specifically for children’s entertainment rather than moral education previous to the 20th century. And before anyone starts naming others (eg Tom Sawyer or The Secret Garden), I am aware that there were children’s novels before the 20th century, hence my reference to such books being “very rare”.