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Novel in Contemporary
Literary Research |
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| Paper Id :
17904 Submission Date :
2023-07-11 Acceptance Date :
2023-07-20 Publication Date :
2023-07-25
This is an open-access research paper/article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For verification of this paper, please visit on
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| Abstract |
In contemporary time, everything is changing such as human
identity, psyche, self and human relations. Innovative technological and
scientific inventions have generated new paradigms to deal with the emerging
human problems. These inventions have influenced the contemporary literary
narratives as the articulations have been shifted from theory to post theory,
postmodern to posthuman, posthuman to post-posthuman, Anthropocene to
post-Anthropocene and beyond. It has also influenced the process of
contemporary research as the focus of recent researchers has shifted from
poetry to fiction and from fiction to films and from films to video games to
explore the ludic and virtual narratives in recent times of digitalization. So,
present research paper is an endeavour to explore how the interest of recent
researchers has moved from poetry to fiction, art, performance, dance,
film/cinema and video games to lay out literary research. |
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| Keywords | Literary Research, Poetry, Fiction, Literary Theory, Identity etc. | ||||||
| Introduction | In a lecture entitled “Manners, Morals, and the Novel”,
Lionel Trilling tried to illustrate the task of the novel as the search of
moral realism. It attempts to record the illusion by highlighting the moral
depth of the characters. It tries to understand the reality of the society in
the form of descriptive, expository and explanatory prose. Like short story and
newspaper, it is also a dominant form of prose. Unlike poetry, it provides
series of events through long narrative in a very lucid language. Its narration
does not use the complex language embedded with irony and obscure meanings.
Trilling conceptualizes the novel in the following way: The characteristic work
of the novel is to record the illusion that snobbery generates and to try to
penetrate to the truth which, as the novel assumes, lies hidden beneath all the
false appearances. (Trilling, 1947:19) It has widely been an accepted critical
perception amongst the scholars that the form of the novel as a literary genre
originated from England. “It was neither Alexander nor Vasco-da-Gama, nor Nadir
Shah who left an indelible lingua-franca on India but the British colonization
which worked wonders.” (Engade, 1995:1) The novel as a literary tool is one of
the forms of prose which is a simple and lucid depiction of events through
certain characters and plot. Its language is not obscure like poetry as in the
article “What is Poetry?” Jacques Derrida puts forward poetry as the small and
spiky but not easy to crack its meaning. It always creates a challenge to its
reader to decode its depth meaning. Its layers seem to be complex which is not
easy to disclose like the prose or fiction. Prose is written in the language of
present day containing the socio-cultural relevance. B. P. Engade opines: Novel
form arrived in India during the late 18th century and the early 19th century,
as an inevitable guest from the West, particularly, England. During the
colonial epoch, education imparted by the Christian missionaries, rendered
immense service to India for, the medium of transmission was English. Thus the
natives of India, had the benefit of acquiring a uniform language of foreign
origin, though speaking their own, different tongues.(2) The concise Oxford
Dictionary of Current English illustrates the meaning of the novel as a
“fictitious prose narrative of book length portraying characters and actions
credibly representative of real life in continuous plot”. Further,
Encyclopaedia Britannica defines the novel as a “genre of fiction (i.e. prose
works created by the imagination), of considerable length and some complexity,
in which characters (usually but not always human beings) interact with one
another in a specific setting”. The Encyclopaedia Americana defines the novel
as a “twentieth century generic term for any type of prose fiction of book
length in which characters and actions are presented in a plot as if
representing persons and events in real life”. It may be opined that the main
features of a novel are: 'prose', 'length', 'narrative', 'characters',
'action', 'plot', 'realism' and 'fiction'. The examples of the novels may be
cited: novel in verse (Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 1832), short novel:
(Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday: A Romance, 2016) novel depicting the lack of
action and plot (a salient feature of the most modern novel), novels avoiding
the narrative and characterization (postmodern fiction), novels reflecting its
rebel against realism (modern and postmodern novels: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin), (Postcolonial novels: Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart and Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas), (Science fiction novels:
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451), novels
illustrating the psychological fragmentation of identity and alienation
(diasporic fiction) such as Meera Syal’s Anita and Me, Neel Mukherjee’s A State
of Freedom and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. In this way, Mikhail Bakhtin related
to novel points out – “novel was the only genre born of this new world and in
total affinity with it” (Bakhtin, 1981:7), and was considered the most adequate
form of literary expression in the modern world. Collier’s Encyclopaedia has
also conceptualized a significant observation related to novel by stating that
the novel “has taken so many shapes, particularly in the last hundred years,
that any more precise definition would eliminate a good proportion of works
called by the name”. (Collier, 1983:17) |
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| Objective of study | In this study, my focus is going to be on a critical study of
the representation of fiction in contemporary literary research in the realm of
humanities. The object of this research work is to bring into light how the
focus of contemporary literary scholars has moved to the fiction from poetry in
recent time. The present research work aims to study the genre of novel in
contemporary time with the following objectives in mind: 1. Tracing the changing notions on fiction in the
contemporary time; 2. Influence of socio-cultural, historic-political factors
that have shaped the transitions in the notion of contemporary literary
research with reference to novel; 3. Critical assessment of various facets related to poetry,
prose and fiction in terms of literary research; 4. Impact of language on the fictional world as contemporary
novelists have invented a new literary idiom; 5. How the focus of researchers at the departments of
literature—Hindi, English, Urdu etc. has moved to art and performance, songs
and dance, cinema and films etc. 6. To trace the shift from poetry to fiction, performance,
cinema, video game etc. |
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| Review of Literature | As has been stated earlier, that my focus is going to be on the notion of the exploration of the genre of novel in contemporary literary research, this research paper is an attempt to investigate the transition in literary research from poetry to other literary forms. The paper examines and explores the aspects of novels in response to history, culture and identity. Most of the works done in this area of research have focused on short stories and poetry, but much critical attention has not been credited to contemporary fictions. |
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| Main Text |
Like other forms of literature, novel has also been
explored from various perspectives which try to serve the straightforward
ideology to the reader regarding the current issues discussed in the text.
Critics with feminist concerns investigate novel through the categories like
gender identity, sexuality, patriarchy, body and self. Marthe Robert in his
magnum opus Origins of the Novel suggests that the novel emerged as a
dominant form of literary expression in the present time: “mainly due to its
encroachments on neighbouring territories it surreptitiously infiltrated,
gradually colonizing almost all literature” (Robert, 4). Or, “similar in many
respects to the imperialistic society from which it sprang ... it is
irresistibly drawn towards the universal and the absolute, towards
generalisation of events and ideas” (4). Edward Said in his Culture and
Imperialism illustrates that “imperialism and the novel fortified each
other to such degree that it is impossible ... to read one without in some way
dealing with the other” (Said, 70-17). Benedict Anderson in Imagined
Communities (1983) goes on to connect the rise of the novel “with the rise
of modern nationalism” (Anderson, 45). In his book, he aptly opines that the
nation attempts to acquire a historical place and status only after becoming
conscious of nationalism. He defines the novel “along with the newspaper, plays
a significant role in re-presenting the imagined community of the nation. The
novel, as a genre, acquires a coherence, which is marked by its function in
creating a nation-idea” (58). George Lukacs, who is a Marxist critic, propounds
an innovative method in his The Theory of The Novel (1920), which he
defines as the “abstract synthesis” to opine the term novel. Lukacs puts
forward a comparative analysis of novel with epic by arguing that the literary
form of epic depicts human characters at home in the universe without having a
sense of themselves as unique individuals, while the novel is a representation
of “transcendental homelessness” or man's alienation from the world. Lukacs pus
his idea forward by depicting: “the novel is the epic of an age in which the
extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence
of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality”
(56). Further he points out that: “The epic gives form to a totality of life
that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and
construct the concealed totality of life” (60). The protagonist of the epic
unlike the novel has never been delineated as an individual in the strict
sense. The major theme of epic does not illustrate personal destiny of the
protagonist but the destiny of the entire community. The material of the novel
has a “discrete, unlimited nature” (81) while that of the epic has a “continuum
- like infinity” (88). The novel as a literary form of expression emerges as
the epic of the modern world which has been “abandoned by God” (88) and which
also narrates the adventures of interiority of the human characters in a lucid
language. The principal character of novel always develops his identity as a
seeker who attempts to reconcile the paradoxical nature of his time and
society. In this way, Mikhail Bakhtin in his “Epic and
Novel” has also tried to suggest the contrast by depicting that the epic, the
oldest form of literary expression which has done its proliferation through the
different phases, with the novel which is “the only developing genre and
therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and
rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding” (Bakhtin, 53). The
protagonist of the epic may not move beyond his “destiny or fate” (66), while
the hero of the novel is represented as “an individual” (66) who emerges as the
reflection of the “inconclusive present-day reality” (66). Bakhtin opines the
fact that the novel and the epic are illustrated by two rival impulses of
“novelness” (68) and “epicness” (68) which may dominate the various forms of
literary expression from time to time and need not to happen in any historical
sequence. Ralph Fox in The Novel and the People has also compared the
novel to the epic arguing it: “The epic art form of our modem, bourgeois
society” (Fox, 72). Christopher Hill, in his Writing and Revolution
in Seventeenth Century England (1985), disseminates his investigation: the
“novel is to bourgeois society what the epic had been to feudal society” (Hill,
324). He brings out his observation through the key elements of the epic that
are military courage, honour, chivalry, and from the seventeenth century
onwards “no significant poet” (324) has written epics. In the same way, Ian
Watt in his The Rise of the novel (1968) has also observed the
development of the literary form of novel in the modern era and he has written
one whole chapter entitled “Fielding and the Epic Theory of the Novel” to
deconstruct Fielding's classification of Joseph Andrews as “a comic epic
poem in prose” (Watt, 1968:249-250). In this book, he endeavours to bring out
the methods to analyse the novel vis-à-vis the epic by arguing: ... it is surely evident that.. .. the epic is,
after all, an oral and poetic genre dealing with the public and usually
remarkable deeds of historical or legendry persons engaged in a collective
rather than an individual enterprise; and none of these things can be said of
the novel (Watt, 1968:249-250) Franco Moretti in Modern Epic (1996)
continues to define Hegel’s perspective of epic to depict that the prominent
novels such as Ulysses or Hundred Years of Solitude are in fact epics,
which have been wrongly classified as novels in a novel-centric literary world
(Moretti, 1996:120). In the similar vein, Joseph Frank in his ‘Spatial Form in
Modem Novel’ (1945) attempts to categorize Ulysses and A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man as epics. Henry James in one of his most
well-known essays “The Art of Fiction (1884)” writes: “the air of reality
(solidity of specification) seems to me to be the: supreme virtue of a novel -
the merit on which all its other merits.... helplessly and submissively depend”
(James, 1884:99). Similarly, Trilling like Henry James has also pointed out in
his essay ‘Manner, Moral and the Novel’ (1950) that “novel…is a perpetual quest
for reality…”(122). He tries to suggest that poetry is full of imagination and
indecision as William Empson in his “The Seventh Types of Ambiguity” deploys
the ambiguities in the development of poetry as a piece of literary expression
but the form of novel emerges as the liberal form of literary articulation in
the modern, postmodern, posthuman, post-anthropocene and digital era. The modernist writers like Henry James, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence were writing in the early twentieth
century. They had debunked the traditional methods of realism and its aspects
in their novels such as continuous narratives, omniscient narrators,
chronological plots and close endings. They had developed an innovative form of
novel by experimenting with the idea of stream of consciousness,
non-chronological and discontinuous narratives, subjectivity, point-of-view,
impression, self-reflexivity and fragmented form. In this regard Frederic
Jameson argues in his “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of
Modernism”: [T]he target of their [the modernists1 attack
becomes the very concept of reality itself ... The objection is thus, clearly,
a critique of something like an ideology of realism, and charges that realism,
by suggesting that representation is possible... tends to perpetuate a
preconceived notion of some external reality to be imitated… (Jameson,
1992:174) Subsequently, postmodern novels appeared as a
reaction against modernist novel. It also shared certain features but the
treatment of the novelists was entirely different. It is not an easy task to
define the exact difference between modern and postmodern novel since both of
these literary movements happened simultaneously. Writers like Beckett,
Ionesco, Kafka, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Arthur Adamov, Nabokov, Rushdie and
Marquez had written the novels that could be marked the postmodern texts.
McHale had depicted the difference between modernist and postmodernist fiction
in the following words: …the dominant of modernist fiction is
epistemological That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and
foreground questions such as… How can I interpret this world of which I am a
part? And what am I in it?... What is there to be known;. Who knows it?; How do
they know it, and with what degree of certainty? (McHale, 1987:9) On the other hand:…the dominant of postmodernist fiction is Ontological... That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like ... which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it...what is a world?' what kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ? (9) In the present time it is not hard to accept the
fact that after modern and postmodern era, not only in English literature but
in the literature written around the globe, the literary articulations are
excessively emerging in the form of fiction. Poetry is often tossed aside in
favour of novel to express the spectrum of sensibilities. After T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965), hardly a couple of poets win the noble prize in literature in
successive decades, who received this award in 1947. Consequently, in the
postcolonial period, few poetic voices receive a shaft of recognition worldwide
such as Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) and Derek Walcott (1930-2017) who belong to
the postcolonial world. They expressed beam of their thoughts through poetry.
In the postcolonial period, novel was the form of literature which was much
explored academically and dragged a large number of readers towards it. It
colonized the other genre of literature as well. A large number of postcolonial
writers such as Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Gunter
Grass (1927-2015), V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018), J. M. Coetzee (1940-), Harold
Pinter (1930-2008), Orhan Pamuk (1952-), Doris Lessing (1919- 2013) and Alice
Munro (1931-) chose navel as a genre to assert complex human relationship,
skepticism, visionary force, identity politics, cultural colonization,
melancholic human soul, everyday prattle multicultural commitment. These
novelists as come from postcolonial world experimented with the narration of
fiction. They put forward the originality of thoughts and delineated innovative
experiences having encountered around their surroundings. They developed the
innovative key words which dominated the entire postcolonial period across the
world even in the native or folk narratives such as colonialism, ambivalence,
alterity, colonial education, essentialism, ethnicity, exoticism, hegemony,
hybridity, ideology, language, magic realism, mapping, meta-narrative,
meta-fiction, mimicry, nation-state, orientalism, race, semiotics, space/place,
subaltern, worlding, other, identity, self, intertextuality, speculation and
diaspora. The diasporic novels are one of the resonant articulations in the
development of postcolonial fiction. In such writings, the novelists endeavour
to explore the thematic contours of ‘movement, migration, or scattering of
people away from an established or ancestral homeland’. Such literary
expressions have revolutionized the reader-writer nexus in the present
multicultural and cosmopolitan world, especially the form of novel. These
novels are embedded with the literary devices of ‘bildungsroman’, ‘kunstlerroman’, ‘allegory’ and
‘antithesis’. These texts reflect the idea of heteroglossia which opines the
process of the multiple readings of a text. In Imaginary Homelands Salman
Rushdie writes: Exile or emigrants or expatriates are haunted by
some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of
being muted into pillars of salt. If we do look back, we must also do in the
knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical
alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of
reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will in short, create
fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary
homelands, Indias of the mind (Rushdie, 1991:10) In the recent past the discourses on diaspora gained much popularity. The major themes related to diasporic consciousness delineated through the genre of novel. Poetry was not taken seriously to deal with diasporic sensibility. A large number of writers appeared from south Asia who illustrated the issues related to history, culture and memory. These writers depicted their identity crises in the territory of England, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Newzeland and America. Their writings illustrated the fragmented relationships between their thoughts and emotions which they realized hard to fulfil in the foreign location. |
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| Conclusion |
As the writers are expressing their themes and issues through
the narratives of novel, the contemporary research scholars have also shifted
their attention to explore the major themes and issues in fictions. The
scholars are exploring novels, films, art, performance and video games to
develop their thesis in the present multicultural global cosmopolitan digital
world. |
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| References | 1. Alinejad, D. “Mapping homelands through virtual spaces:
Transnational embodiment and Iranian diaspora bloggers”. Global Networks,
11(1), 2011. 43–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2010.00306.x |
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