WOrd on the street is that literature used to be mostly poetry, or at least verse, but it changed with the rise of the middle class and the novel, which was written by/for them?
Why is this? Is it true? Why did the middle-classes suddenly not want verse but long prose? Verse had been the standard since Homer, or maybe Gilgamesh. I don’t understand what exactly is middle class about a novel.
This is probably better suited to Cafe Society than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
That doesn’t make sense, novels have existed a lot longer than “the middle classes” have had any size and verse stayed popular for a long time. Early 17th-Century’s Quijote is, among other things, a farce on “Chivalrous Novels” (think King Arthur) which were all the rage at the time and had been for over a century. And at the same time, Cantares de Ciego were the illiterate’s way of getting their yellow press and lots of plays of the era were in verse.
If you think about it, verse is still popular now, it’s just that most of us prefer our verse in sung form rather than declaimed or read.
I’d hazard it has to do with the rise of the middle class generally, and the spread of literacy following the invention of printing. As books got cheaper and number of people with literacy and leisure time expanded, so the reading public expanded from the wealthy and scholarly to include the whole of the middle class. It’s not surprising that books aimed at a middle-class audience tended to reflect middle-class concerns.
As for the change from poetry to prose, that might have to do with the change from works intended to be performed publicly (Shakespeare, for instance) to works intended to be published as texts and read privately. That would allow texts to become longer and more complex, and reduce the impact of poetic forms.
Don Quixote is generally regarded as the first novel – i.e., fictional narrative in prose. The romances it was satirizing were all in verse.
Significance of the rise of the middle class, off the top of my head, would involve an educated class with leisure time for reading. Not sure what you’re asking if that’s not the answer.
I gotta ask – by who? There were novels in ancient Rome – prose fictional narratives meant for general consumption. Heck, there’s at least one anthology of excerpts from such works, entitled Roman Novels, or something like that.
Example:
the Wikipedia page on Novel lists lots of fictional prose works prior to Do Quixote, but shys away from actually calling them novels:
Ugh – that was one of those “everyone knows” statements – and I’ve gotta get dressed and get to work. Will look for a cite later, if no one bails me out in the meantime.
Prose romances, and prose fiction in general, definitely existed prior to Don Quixote (at least in English – my knowledge of medieval and early modern Spanish lit is pretty rusty). There are late medieval prose romances like Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and the Prose Merlin, and plenty of Renaissance ones like Sir Philip Sidney’s monumental Arcadia and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It).
All of these works, of course, deal primarily with the aristocratic world (with the occasional shepherd or shepherdess who isn’t a prince or princess in disguise, in the case of pastoral romances, but it’s definitely an aristocrat’s view of rural life). I’d guess that the association between prose fiction and the middle classes may have originated with Thomas Deloney, a hugely popular writer of the 1590s. Deloney wrote a number of prose tales about tradesmen and artisans (who were also sometimes princes in disguise, but there are also plenty of sharply-drawn middle-class characters and overt celebration of middle-class occupations and values): Jack of Newbury, Parts One and Two of The Gentle Craft, and Thomas of Reading. As it turned out, there was a huge market for this stuff – early editions of Deloney are rare because they were literally read until they fell to bits. (Deloney is a cracking good read, by the way, especially Thomas of Reading, which has a gloriously daft plot about a couple of serial-killing innkeepers and how they’re brought to justice.)
Modern writers are typically going to be lower-to-middle class themselves. And consider the markets; writers are typically going to write to the group that will buy their product.
Both novels and poetry are by nature going to be somewhat less popular with the lower classes because they have both a lower literacy rate and less free time; both to read them or write them.
When it comes to food, entertainment, that sort of thing the upper class always tends to be concerned more with using it to flaunt their alleged superiority rather than if they actually enjoy it. So, the popularity of novels makes it less likely that the upper class will read or write them (or at least admit it); rather like how they aren’t likely to admit they prefer a hamburger over some fancy, expensive and rare dish. And they are relatively small in number, so they provide both a smaller market, little extra profit (since unlike arts like painting, novels have never pulled off the “let’s make a hugely expensive version for the wealthy” trick), and a smaller pool of potential writers.
The middle class has high literacy, more free time and money than the lower classes and is more interested in doing things because they like it than because it shows off their alleged superiority.
So, the middle class is associated with novels because they like them, can indulge in them, often write them, and are willing to admit it.
Sorry – forgot about this. Don Quixote is generally consideredthe first modern novel.
I have no idea what “modern” means in this context, and neither, it seems, does any source I can find.
So you are saying that the middle class is relatively free from pretension, and are keeping up with the Jones’s solely for their own ‘enjoyment’, while the upper class is eating ripen brie (while holding their nose) just to ‘flaunt their alleged superiority’? To whom? Are the ‘uppers’ going to the opera house, when they don’t even like music, in order to impress the masses (who at best have a vague comprehension that opera even exists)?
If you think the middle classes are free from pretension, I cannot imagine where or how you got that idea, but you must live far, far from the suburbs, or (more likely) be one yourself, and therefore immune to your own class’s pretensions.
I would recommend the book ‘Class’ by Paul Fussell for an examination of the American class system. Usually it is the upper classes and lower that have the least pretension, since they have little to prove or gain, respectively, while the middles are wallowing in it.
As with so many other things, our cultural image of the novel and poetry comes from Victorian England.
Image doesn’t develop from the first instance of anything; it solidifies when it engulfs the public consciousness. Once that happens it’s very hard to change even when the product and the public changes.
Books were simply too expensive to be anything but an upper class indulgence for most of their existence. What changed was the creation of cheap mass printing in the middle of the 19th century. Newspapers went from tiny circulations in coffee houses to thousands and then millions. Magazines started hitting nationwide audiences. (There was a Penny Magazine in England as early as 1832.) Dickens famously serialized his novels but so did hundreds of others who were forgotten.
The audience for these novels was the rising and numerically increasing middle class. Especially women. Women have pretty much always been the main buyers of novels, although the more literary fiction may be somewhat skewed toward men. Reading was a good, instructive, moralistic middle class endeavor and was therefore promoted by women who wanted to raise their household image.
When the presses got even better, cheap novels could be printed with paper covers. (In the U.S. they are remembered as dime novels, but they started earlier as nicklebacks, with English equivalents.) England publishes them in cartloads. These cheapies lowered the image of the novel even further and brought in working class readers, maybe more so in the U.S. We remember them as being blood and thunder western adventures, but in fact many, many women wrote these as well.
Poetry didn’t travel as well as prose, though it was probably far more popular in the 19th century than today. Readers then as now liked bulk. Fat novels were better than skinny novels and both won out over brief poems. Poetry remained an upper class product, with some major exceptions.
Most of this stayed exactly as true in the 20th century as the 19th. Sentimental tripe, ponderous adventure, and fluffy genre sold the vast majority of books. Most of them were sold to the middle class, and its not coincidental that most of the population was now middle class. They’ve always liked a certain type of book and authors have always been willing to turn it out. Poetry doesn’t sell. Poets have small audiences and small audiences are always an upper class luxury product.
Class, BTW, is a fascinating book, filled with many insights. It also is a badly dated picture of an America that has been vanishing ever since WWII and contains piles of nonsense. I’d recommend it because it is such a fun read, but I would warn any reader from taking it too seriously.
In agreement with Exapno here in that this notion of what poetry and prose are is very, very western-european. However, he/she misses the mark by a lot on most of his/her other points.
It was not always the case, for example, even in the US or UK, that poetry required small audiences, or that it was not popular. Actually, until the 20th century, Americans would’ve found the notion of poetry as an “upper class art” quite strange indeed.
In fact, even today, in many countries and cultures, it is poetry that is seen as the common (in the sense of “universal”, not in the sense of “commonplace”) art and novels/film more highfallutin’. In Iran, for example, while you may not be able to find a massive number of people who can offer an in-depth discussion of, say, Mohammad-Ali Jamalzada’s novels, you’d be hard-pressed to find even a cab-driver who can’t recite Hafiz’ poetry by heart. In Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, poetry is so popular that the indigenous equivalent to American Idol features not singers but poets!
If you think about it, this makes a certain kind of sense. Poetry is often more compact, easier to memorize, more conducive to oral transmission and therefore doesn’t require the recipient to expend as much time or material resources as a novel.
But moving outside the Middle East, you find places like Russia, India, China, Poland and Germany where, though poetry does not reign supreme the way it often does in the Arabic-speaking or Persian-speaking world, you’re just as likely to meet a poetry-lover as you are to meet someone who loves reading great novels. One of the key factors, I think, is that, in such places, the study of poetry in primary education is approached very differently. In Russia, for example, children are made to memorize large amounts of poetry by such classics as Lermontov, Pushkin, Tyutchev and others. This memorization is often not accompanied by comprehension exercises but is simply treated as a rote task (i.e. the exact opposite of an English teacher asking you to explain the purpose or nature of a metaphor in a Frost poem.) While this method may seem like a stupid preservation of a tradition for its own sake, and schoolchildren usually hate it, it actually plays a key role in their enculturation and cultivation. As the years pass, the poems are still stored in their memory and they develop an appreciation for them as they grow into adulthood. A sad romantic breakup, for example, might remind you of Pushkin’s poem on losing his mistress which you’d memorized years earlier. Thus the poems become a part of your experience.
The west is moving away from rote learning, and for many good reasons. But poetry has suffered as a result.
I’ve also given a long rant on middle-class westerners not reading poetry here on my blog, which you can peruse at your leisure. It makes some of the points I’ve made here, and some new ones.
Cheers
There have been jokes about poetry being upper class and prose being middle class dating back to at least 1670, when Moliere worte Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
Conversely, Chaucer’s narrative poetry in The Canterbury Tales is mainly about working-class and middle-class life in medieval England – the knights and such are supporting cast.
Only a tiny sliver of what’s now considered “the upper class” has nothing to prove. Fussell solved this problem by redefining “middle class” to mean “middle to lower-upper class,” and reserve upper for the real Rockefellers. Folks like art critics who graduated from prestigious universities still have lots to prove and people to impress, and wouldn’t be considered “upper class” by Fussell’s classification.
To themselves. And yes, the middle class is relatively free of pretension. Mainly because the upper class is full of it.
Nonsense; the upper class has a lot to prove. They have to convince themselves that they are superior, that they really deserve all the privilege and luxury they have. They listen to music they don’t like, buy art they don’t like, eat food they don’t like because they are trying to convince themselves that they are more refined, superior to the average person who likes ordinary music, art and food. That kind of obsession is the norm in upper classes everywhere.
You’re obviously passionate about the subject and knowledgeable about many of its facets.
I’d like to hear more of your defense about poetry not being an “upper class art” in 19th century America.
Perhaps it’s just because I specialize in popular cultural history, but all my reading shows an overwhelming preponderance of prose fiction in the books and magazines after the mass printing revolution. Poetry was more popular than today, in all probability, but that’s about all you can say.
We may just be differing in our time periods, where you say 20th century and I push that back 50 or so years. However, my contention is that mass printing vastly changed the publishing and reading landscape of America - and England as well - and that the change was complete before the 20th century started.