The novel

Novels

clef moodle : approfondissement littérature schmutz

The four roots :

Picaresque stories => first person, about a rogue, a picaro is a low born adventurer, he goes from one place to another maybe with a goal maybe not and went from one social middle to another, it has episodes just like a TV serie, the structure is quite long, there is normal stories about normal people, la satyrique sert à critiquer la société

Romance => 20ème siècle, as a genra in itself it was recognasable in the aristratic court, chevalry medieval, the characters are quite realistics, in the romance the hero is a noble prince who will always fight for the king

Novella => it has a root which means the news, it talks about local events ( humourous, political, amourous ), it is something shorter than the novel, it's realistics, it is original from italia in the middle age, in it you can have legends or romantical tales

Pastoral => young shepherds with a pure heart, stories of love between a sheperd and a shepherde

The novel itself was born in the enlightenment. More and more people began to write and to be able to read, they became smarter.

The book Moll Flanders is a picaresque story, the character is a rogue, from the title we know that the story will be about a low born, a felon is a criminal and a crook is an escroc, her life is told in episodes, that's also a religious novel, you see a sort of tension in it between the believes that there is a lot of goodness in humanity and the ones who are sceptical about it, you see that it's a novel of enlightenment, from the first lines the author criticize the english society, he wants to teach reason to the reader, it's a moralist novel.

The book Pamela or Virtue rewarded is a moralist novel and it is an epistolary novel ( with only letters ). The author was a publisher, a businnes man. Pamela write letters to her parents most of the times from the place she works. Henry Fielding makes fun of the novel of the author Richardson with making a book call Shamela, the author of a novel couldn't be God , the author of a novel was mortaly boring if he just does a moralist novel, if he just stop at it. The way fielding defined what he wrote was a comic poem in prose, his novel is epic, there was a democritation of the readers.

Jane Austen is an editor who wrote what he called a novel of manners, there is in his novel a very fine description of society and customs. The convention of this society is dominant in this novel, the characters in this novel are differenciated according to how close they are to these values. This novel concern the society of landed gentry ( nobles qui ont des terres ). He is a real master of irony ( when you say the contrary of what you think ). The author makes the readers side with the narrator. She has a very satyrical tone of her society

The narrator is extremely present, he can't be forget by us, he is our teacher, there is always a moral. This places the reader on rails. When the narrator pause it makes us come back in reality. The authors wants more and more to leave us without the help that the narrator gives us. In the 19th century the characters evoluted. In the 18th centure the characters were flat, they have only one dimension, we can easily predict what they will do next. In the next century the characters became more complex. We call these characters stereotypes. The 18th century is the century of reason.

19th century

Romanticism => the literary movement traditionally dated 1798 to 1832 in England, affected all the arts through the 19th century. It's a mediated idea of the medieval age, the "it was better before". The supernatural is present in romantics novels. Inthe 18th we were rational people. The 19th century was the beginning of alpinism, men wanted to see the heights of the mountains. On est plus du tt dans le raisonnable des Lumières.

Wuthering Heights extract poly => a supernatural encounter, the imagination is unleashed ( déchaînée ), nature is not friendly, the ghost remained because Catherine still loves Heathcliff and their love transcend death, the emotions of the individual are very important in the book

Frankeinstein => the nature is unfriendly : North Pole, the narrator first encounter with the beast in this vast land is terrifying there is a lot of fear, a real gothic novel, a great supernatural book

Dracula is a gothic novel too, dracula is a vampire, there is ghosts that comes back : this broke the opposition between past and present and they disrupt our sens of time/chronology, there is an opposition between modern technology and medieval love : it resolved with the feeling of uncanny ( étrangeté/“That class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”=> Freud 1919 )

The Scarlet Letter => complexe characters, evil, gothic book, characters suffering, unfriendly nature

Moby Dick => one of the character wants to kill Moby Dick at all costs, humans wants to control natural elements and to change them, they wants to master the natural elements, the nature is more powerful than the characters, all the senses are open

The sublime => the feeling that something is so much bigger than you, a lot of supernatural, a lot of expression of feelings, artists tries to exprime the feelings of the Sublime, they see the limit of rationnality, philosophics artists tries to see beyond the limits of rationnality, there is a difference between the sublime and the beautiful, a French garden is beautiful/geometrical/rationnal/not dangerous, the painter Turner paintings are not beautiful they are sublime, the sublime is not beautiful or pretty there is chaos in it, it's excessives experiences, you go beyond the limits of the human, there is the might of wild nature, things you can't control like the conscious, they used the sublime to chock us out of the limits of our daily life, the sublime is something rare, the character can be terrifying, you have very strong characters with a very strong and strange personnality

Romantics and Gothics novels => growing importance of the individuals to oppose at society at large, a growing experience of the senses, we are not just pure being of existence, rationnality made us human, cartesian's ideas are superseded, there is an importance of the senses, it make the vision of humans much more complexe, there is paradoxes who are explored, the paradoxe between the old and the new ( example => Dracula ), the opposition between man and nature, much less interventions of the narrator, sometimes there are imoral actions, the novels have no longer a morality, the reader has to be smarter, he has more freedom of interpretation

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