I’m finally getting into seriously tackling “classic literature”, and some old “novels” I’ve read recently and in the past have made me wonder when the concept of the “novel” became formalized in its current form, that is, a book-length story that has a complete, over-arching narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
My reason for asking relates to some of the 19th-century works I’ve read, but goes as far back as a collection of King Arthur stories that was presented (perhaps incorrectly) as a “novel”.
Specifically, certain classic “novels” I’ve read, or am reading, don’t seem to fulfill the modern concept of a novel. Examples: Dickens’ first “novel”, The Pickwick Papers; Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women; a G.K. Chesterton novel, the title of which I can’t recall at the moment.
Instead of telling what I would call a complete, book-length story, they instead seem to be a collection of characters who go places, and things happen. In other words, they seem to be more a series of vignettes (not even short stories) that just happen to feature the same characters. Often, the chapters come across as diary or journal entries but written in the third person.
I realize that a lot of this is due to the fact that many of these classic books were originally published in serial form in newspapers or magazines. But then I can look at the way a lot of more modern authors also originally published that way (Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, for example), yet there was definitely an overarching narrative when read in “novel” form.
So, when did the idea of a “novel” settle into its modern form?
Except that the OP didn’t ask when the novel came into being, but when the concept of a novel, in its modern form, came into being. When did people start talking about “novels,” referring to certain books as novels, or making a distinction between novels and other works that did not fall into that category?
The OP is right that it can be difficult to pin down exactly which books should and should not count as novels. Don Quixote and The Pickwick Papers are perhaps picaresque novels, which are more episodic than the classically structured novel with a beginning, middle, and end to its plot. And the OP alluded to “fix-ups”: novels (if it’s fair to call them that) that were originally made up of separately-published stories.
It’s more than just that early novels were serialized. Even when they were compiled into book form, they were often published in two or three volumes.
I’d define the modern concept of a novel to be a continuous work intended to be published and read as a whole as a book. That seems to have coalesced around 1850 in Britain. I’m sure you could find many later examples - we’re talking a trend rather than a revolution - and literary novels were just as varied then as now and many wanted to carry readers along a series of highs.
Even so, virtually all sensible authors tried to serialize their works before book publication. Magazines paid very well, probably more than publishers, so that was twice the money or greater. This lasted well into the 20th century. Daily newspapers in the interwar period regularly ran serials, though they were usually mysteries or romance rather than high literature. But even Fitzgerald had five books serialized, though they appeared after book publication when he already proved their popularity.
I took a class on the history of the novel when I was in university. We were taught that the first novels were:
Pamela <–first big seller, had fan clubs called “Pamelists”
Moll Flanders <–even older, very salacious
Tristram Shandy - not first, but very innovative
And one more that was written by someone named something like Henry Adams or something. Or the book was called something like Henry Adams. It was notable for having chapters and actually has brief introductions that explain why the author used chapters, a new idea in fictional books.
Yes, this is pretty much what I was getting at. And I wasn’t really going for “what was the first novel”, because I suppose that, in any period, there are going to be individual works that might fit a modern definition but were not “the rule” at the time of their writing/publication. It’s kind of like the question, “who was the first heavy metal band?” You can point to many songs that were released before “heavy metal” became a defined genre that more or less fit the definition of “early heavy metal”, but the bands that recorded them are not really “heavy metal” bands.
Rather, I’m going for something more along the lines of, when did it become generally expected by the reading public that a “novel” meant a single, book-length story, intentionally written as such (even if it was originally published in serial form, which seems to me to be a way to publish as the author goes along, rather than doing it all at once).
For what it’s worth, novels were a well-known form of writing by the time Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey in 1803, although not as respectable as other forms of writing.
While I might say that Foundation is less obviously serialized than I, Robot, it’s not by much. Yes, there’s an overarching story which one is framed with at the beginning of the series and thus one sees it as a bit more important than each individual story, while the opposite is definitely true in I, Robot, but it’s quite clearly episodic in nature as opposed to a continuous narrative. That said, if you wanted to write a centuries-spanning tale, you have to do it in episodic form; the other options would be to write it way too simplistically for what would be expected of a novel, or simply never be able to finish telling the whole story.
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I don’t think there’s a really good answer to the question, as the form was basically continually evolving from antiquity. A great deal of those evolutionary developments were due to the means by which they were transmitted rather than a change in literary ideas. Early long-form stories had to be poetry, because it had to be memorized, with there no good way of writing down and storing tales of epic length, and this meant there had to be some sort of rhythm that made it easier to remember and robust against memory failings. As the cost of reproduction and storing of stories decreased, there was a gradual shift into the ability to present long-form stories in a single portable article, and the cheaper ways of doing this informed the writing of the time. Once it became far more expensive to secure the rights to publish something that the media the stories were told on, it made sense that finally the stories mainly settled down to the length at which a typical writer could actually maintain a single story thread. Novels are still of many different lengths depending on how much material the author can cobble together to present as part of the same story before being forced to publish it to make money off of it. Now that the weight of the book is totally irrelevant, we might see some authors already set for life try to write extremely long and complicated stories that take them decades to put together, and only release them as e-books.
While the Foundation series as a whole spans centuries, that’s over the course of multiple complete novels (I’ll leave aside any debate over precisely how many novels count as part of the series). Any single novel of the series is much more condensed in time (the first, and most episodic, covers the greatest span, but it’s still short enough for some characters to be alive for all the episodes).
Golden Age science fiction is an extreme case. From the time that Gernsback codified the genre in Amazing Stories in 1926 until after WWII, only a handful of titles from sf magazines were published in hardcover, and those were almost always fantasy rather than sf. Novels were serialized or even advertised as “complete in this issue” but they were generally much shorter than modern f&sf novels or contemporary mysteries. Essentially, neither the novels nor shorter works had any afterlife whatsoever, not even in short story anthologies, which didn’t exist. Mainstream publishers thought sf was idiocy for illiterates and wanted nothing to do with it.
The atomic bomb made sf temporarily the hottest thing, pun intended. At least a dozen small presses were founded to bring back classic stories in hardcovers. Hardcovers were, unlike magazines, sold in bookstores, bought by libraries, and reviewed in newspapers and magazines. Over ten years virtually the entirety of John W. Campbell’s pre-war Astounding Science Fiction had been republished. What had originally been published as story series were now repackaged, often with a frame story to connect them, as “novels” even when they were no such thing. Novels sold better than story collections.
The Foundation series was supposed to recount the 1000 year plan of Hari Seldon. It ended after 300 years. Asimov got a $50,000 advance in 1981 to continue the saga, a staggering sum at the time. But there’s no possible way to say the classic Foundation Trilogy had an ending. It simply stops.
Don’t forget The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, or the novels of Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild, etc.
Robinson Crusoe was followed in the early 18th century by Eliza Haywood’s many novels, Love in Excess, The Fair Captive, and many more.
(Note the date, 1719)
Certainly, the idea of the novel was well established by the mid 18th century.
Later in the 18th century, there were all the Gothic novels, e.g. those of Ann Radcliffe, inspired by Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the novels of Fanny Burney, starting with Evelina (that were such an inspiration to Jane Austen), etc., etc.
When I took the course The Novel through Austen (followed by The Novel through Conrad, both of which were my favorite courses in college), the professor said that Pamela was really the first novel, in his opinion.
