MH Abrams: The Modern Novel

1. Introduction: The Modern Novel According to MH Abrams “novel” is the term applied to “a great variety of writings” which are “extended works of fiction written in prose”. This definition helped distinguish the novel from short story and the novelette. In most European languages the term for “novel” was “roman”, which was derived from the medieval term “romance”. The English name is derived from the Italian “novella”, meaning “a little new thing”. Novella, short tales in prose, and picaresque narratives which emerged in sixteenth-century Spain were predecessors of the novel. The former was in vogue in Italy during the fourteenth century. Picaresque narratives, on the other hard, is derived from the term “picaro” which in Spanish means “rogue.

The rise of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with the rise of the middle class. Therefore, one of the most significant features of the novel was that it focused on the bourgeois lifestyle and values. The novel was a dominant literary form during the Victorian period. The realistic novel of the nineteenth century gave the effect of realism “by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in a social class, operate in a developed social structure” (Abrams, 254). Jesse Matz in The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction makes an excellent point. He says: “The modern novel has always been modern – always concerned mainly with contemporary life, and, as the name suggests, always after the new thing.” However, being modern took on a whole new meaning at the beginning of the twentieth century. The twentieth-century modernity meant “snapping all continuities with the past, putting human character and life itself into a state of constant change” (Matz,