The novel - we take it apart "by the bones". Novel: genre essence

In literature, a novel is a genre of a work. It is mainly written in prose, has a narrative character and a relatively large volume.

Literary term

The medieval chivalric romance gave the world the modern name of the genre. It comes from Old French romanz... Further development in different cultures and countries caused some differences in terms. So, the English-language name of the genre is novel- from the word novella... Old French term in English culture gave the name to the current in art (romanticism) and one of the forms of the genre - a love story (romance).

Character traits

A novel in literature is a long fictional story about the life or a moment in the life of a hero. Today, it is most often characterized by the following features:

• Speech. Most novels today are written in prose, despite the fact that poetry was originally called that. After in the 13th century, works began to be written for reading more than for performance, prose almost completely occupied the literary speech of the European novel.
• Fiction. In contrast to biography, journalism and historiography, this genre is distinguished by a fictional plot that has no connection with real events and people.
• Volume. To date, the novel is the most voluminous genre fiction although controversy arises over the minimum length required. In this regard, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between novel and story.
• Content is the most complex and controversial characteristic of the genre. Previously thought to be a description fictional life and the emotions of the hero. Today it is customary in a novel to describe the personal experience of one or more characters. The content of the novel varies so much that there is a division into forms and subgenres.

Historical typology of the novel

Historically, it is difficult to determine the origin of the novel as a separate literary genre. Strictly speaking, the first European novel is Don Quixote, but the history of the genre dates back to the Middle Ages. Throughout its evolution, the following forms were distinguished:

• A chivalric romance is epic genre poetry using elements of fiction. The main focus of the story is actions. Contemporaries called this form a courtly romance.
• Allegorical novel is a form of genre using specific images and actions to explain abstract, complex concepts. Fables are an ideal example of allegory in literature, and the pinnacle of the allegorical novel was “ The Divine Comedy»Dante Alighieri.

• A novel of morals, or a satirical novel, differs rather in content than in strict compliance with any historical period... "Satyricon" Petronius can be called a novel of mores, as well as the work of Cervantes "Don Quixote".
• The philosophical novel is a movement in 18th century literature that focuses on finding answers to eternal questions. Voltaire's Candide became the pinnacle of the philosophical novel. Philosophy has always played important role in literature, therefore, a philosophical novel cannot be limited to the framework of one century. The works of Hesse, Mann and Nietzsche were written much later, but they are prominent representatives of this direction.
• A psychological novel is a kind of genre aimed at studying the inner world of heroes. Not a single historical form of the novel has had such a cardinal and profound influence on the development of the genre as the psychological novel. In fact, he overturned the very definition of the literary genre and today is the dominant type of novel.

It is almost impossible to give an exact and absolutely complete classification of such a genre as a novel, since, in general, such works are always in conflict with accepted literary conventions. In this literary genre, at all stages of its development, elements are always closely intertwined. modern drama, journalism, and cinema. The only constant element of the novel is the way of storytelling in the form of reportage. Thanks to this, the main types of the novel can still be distinguished and described.

Initially, in the 12-13th centuries, the word roman denoted any written text in Old French, and only in the second half of the 17th century. partially acquired its modern semantic content.

Social novel

The basis of such works is different options the behavior adopted in a particular society, and the actions of the heroes that contradict or correspond to these values. Social romance has 2 varieties: cultural-historical and moral.

A moralistic novel is a chamber social story that focuses on the standards and moral nuances of social behavior. A striking example works of this kind serve as Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice.

A cultural history novel usually describes the history of a family against the background of the cultural and moral standards of its time. In contrast to the moralistic, this type of novel touches on history, subjects individuals to deep study and offers its own social psychology. A classic example cultural historical novel is "War and Peace" by Tolstoy. It is noteworthy that this form of the novel is very often imitated by the so-called blockbusters. For example, the work of M. Mitchell "Gone with the Wind", at first glance, has all the signs of a cultural-historical novel. But the abundance of melodramatic episodes, stereotypical characters and superficial social Psychology suggests that this novel is just an imitation of a serious work.

Psychological novel

In this view, all the attention of the reader is focused on the inner world of a person. A work in the genre of a psychological novel is full of internal monologues, the stream of consciousness of the protagonist, analytical commentaries and symbolism. "Great Expectations" by Dickens, "Notes from the Underground" by Dostoevsky - bright representatives psychological form novel.

A novel of ideas

A novel of ideas or a "philosophical" novel uses its heroes as carriers of various intellectual theories. In works of this type, a lot of space is always given to various kinds of ideas and opinions about everything in the world, from moral values society to space. An example of such a novel is the work of the famous philosopher Plato "Dialogues", in which the heroes are the mouthpiece of Plato himself.

Adventure novel

Quest romance, romance with intrigue, knightly romance, spy romance also belong to this type of romance. As a rule, such works are full of intricacies of plot, brave and strong heroes, love and passion. The main purpose of adventure novels is the entertainment of the reader, comparable, for example, to cinema.

The longest novel, People of Goodwill, by Louis Henri Jean Farigoule, aka Jules Romain (France), was published in 27 volumes in 1932-1946. The novel has 4,959 pages and approximately 2,070,000 words (not including a 100-page index).

Experimental novel

The main feature of experimental novels is that they are quite difficult. Unlike the classical types of the novel, in these works is torn logic of cause and effect. An experimental novel may, for example, be absent as such, knowing who the protagonist is is also optional, all attention here is paid to the style, structure and form of reproduction.

Related article

Sources:

• ROMAN (literary genre)

Charles Dickens - english writer, an essayist and novelist, is one of the largest prose writers of the 19th century, a recognized classic of world literature. All of Dickens's novels are written in the style of high realism and are permeated with criticism of the injustice of hypocrisy and the vices of society.

The main literary works of Dickens include 20 novels, 1 collection of stories, 3 collections of selected stories and a large number of essays.

Dickens's most famous novels

"Posthumous of the Pickwick Club" - the very first novel of the writer, after the publication of which Dikkenasa expected a dizzying success. The work tells about a comic epic, the main character of which is, eccentric, highly moral, impeccably honest, selflessly brave and infinitely naive optimist Mr. Pickwick - the creator of the club of the same name. The novel in its satirical presentation of the life of English society and grotesque protagonist is very similar to "Don Quixote" by Cervantes.

Dickens spontaneously fell into a trance quite often, was subject to visions and from time to time experienced states of déjà vu.

The Adventures of Oliver Twist is the second novel that tells the life story of a little orphan boy forced to wander the London slums. On his way, he meets the baseness and nobility of people from various walks of English society. The pages of the work depict rather believable pictures of the life of the British society XIX century. In this novel, the writer acts as a humanist, affirming the power of a good beginning in a person. The boy Oliver's sincere desire for an honest life overcomes a cruel fate, and everything ends well.

Dickens's next novel was The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, which continued the theme of a destroyed childhood. Like Oliver Twist, this tale has a good ending. The novel was published in small parts from March to 1839.
Even before it was published last issue Nicholas Nickleby, the writer begins work on a new project called The Antiquities Shop, which was also published in small portions every week from April 1840 to February 1841. The novel was very popular in Great Britain and America.

Immediately after the publication of the Antiquities Shop, a new work by the writer entitled Barneby Raj begins to appear in the same format. This novel was a well-worn thing of Dickens, he promised it to his very first publisher in 1836, but became carried away " By the Pickwick Club"And postponed the case for later.

After that, the publication of the books included in the collection began. selected works under common name"Christmas stories", which were devoted to the topic and everything connected with it. This collection includes such works of the writer as: "Christmas", "Bells", "Cricket Behind the Hearth", "Battle of Life", "Persecuted Man". All the works included in this collection are written in the style of social preaching, but in a light artistic form.

After his trip to America, Dickens had a parody of the American way of life called Martin Chuzzlewit. Many overseas critics and readers did not like the writer's caustic satire, they met this work with hostility and condemned the writer, considering the publication of the novel an extreme tactlessness.

The next novel by the writer "Dombey and Son" became one of the best in the work of Dickens. In this work, all facets of Dickens' talent are very well spelled out. A wealth of colors, an endless series of eccentric characters, life situations and situations, constant graceful, indignation, bordering on revolutionary pathos: all this is filled with the novel "Dombey and Son".

Another major work of Dickens, which no longer contained the amount of humor and was largely autobiographical, was the novel "David Copperfield", published after the publication of "Dombey and Son". The work has a serious and elaborate theme of protesting against the new soulless capitalist society and praising moral values ​​and family.

Despite the fact that in his will the writer asked not to erect monuments to him, in 2012 it was decided to erect a monument on the main square of Portsmouth. The monument will be unveiled on June 9, 2013, by Martin Jeggins.

Late works

After "David Copperfield" in Dickens's novels there is more melancholy and hopelessness, humor fades into the background, values ​​that were undeniable in the past are increasingly questioned. Late works of the writer include the novels: Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two, Great Expectations, the last completed novel Our Mutual Friend and the unfinished detective work The Mystery of Edwin Drood ...

Sources:

• Best books Charles Dickens

ROMAN (literary genre) ROMAN (literary genre)

ROMAN (French Roman, German Roman; English novel / romance; Spanish novela, Italian romanzo), central genre (cm. GENRE) European literature New time (cm. NEW TIME (in history)), fictional, in contrast to the adjacent genre of the story (cm. Tale), an extensive, subject-branching prose narration (despite the existence of compact, so-called "little novels" (fr. le petit roman), and poetry novels, for example, "novel in verse" "Eugene Onegin").
In contrast to the classic epic (cm. EPOS) the novel focuses on the depiction of the historical present and the destinies of individuals, ordinary people who are looking for themselves and their destiny in this-worldly, "prosaic" world, which has lost its original stability, integrity and sacredness (poetry). Even if in a novel - for example, in a historical novel, the action is transferred to the past, this past is always evaluated and perceived as immediately preceding the present and correlated with the present.
The novel as open to modernity, formally not ossified, becoming a genre of literature of the New and Modern times, cannot be exhaustively defined in universalist terms theoretical poetics, but can be characterized in the light of historical poetics, exploring the evolution and development of artistic consciousness, history and prehistory art forms. Historical poetics takes into account both the diachronic variability and diversity of the novel, and the conventionality of using the word "novel" itself as a genre "label". Not all novels, even novels exemplary from the modern point of view, were defined by their creators and the reading public as “novels”.
Initially, in the 12-13th centuries, the word roman denoted any written text in Old French, and only in the second half of the 17th century. partially acquired its modern semantic content. Cervantes (cm. SERVANTES Saavedra Miguel de)- the creator of the paradigmatic novel of the New Time "Don Quixote" (1604-1615) - called his book "history", and the word "novela" used to name the book of stories and short stories " Didactic novellas"(1613).
On the other hand, many works that the criticism of the 19th century - the heyday of the realistic novel - after the fact called "novels", are not always such. A typical example is poetic-prosaic pastoral eclogs (cm. ECLOGA (in literature)) the Renaissance, turned into "pastoral novels", the so-called " folk books»16th century, including a parody five-book by F. Rabelais. (cm. RABLE Francois) Fantastic or allegorical satirical narratives dating back to the ancient "Menippean satire" are artificially classified as novels. (cm. MENIPPOVA SATIR)", Such as" Criticon "by B. Graciana (cm. GRACIAN-I-MORALES Baltasar), "The Way of the Pilgrim" by J. Bunyan (cm. BENIAN John), "The Adventures of Telemachus" by Fenelon (cm. FENELON Francois), satire by J. Swift (cm. SWIFT Jonathan), "Philosophical stories" by Voltaire (cm. Voltaire), "Poem" by N. V. Gogol (cm. GOGOL Nikolay Vasilievich) « Dead Souls"," Penguin Island "by A. France (cm. FRANCE Anatole)... Also, not all utopias can be called novels. (cm. UTOPIA), although - on the border of utopia and the novel at the end of the 18th century. a genre emerged utopian novel(Morris (cm. MORRIS William), Chernyshevsky (cm. CHERNYSHEVSKY Nikolay Gavrilovich), Zola (cm. ZOLYA Emil)), and then his counterpart-antipode - a dystopian novel ("When the sleeper wakes up" by H. Wells (cm. WELLES Herbert), "We" Eug. Zamyatin (cm. ZAMYATIN Evgeny Ivanovich)).
The novel, in principle, is a borderline genre, associated with almost all types of discourse adjacent to it. (cm. DISCURSIVE), both written and oral, easily absorbing foreign genre and even foreign verbal structures: essay documents, diaries, notes, letters (epistolary novel (cm. EPISTOLARY LITERATURE)), memoirs, confessions, newspaper chronicles, plots and images of folk and literary fairy tales, national and sacred tradition (for example, gospel images and motifs in the prose of F.M.Dostoevsky (cm. DOSTOEVSKY Fyodor Mikhailovich)). There are novels in which the lyrical beginning is clearly expressed, in others features of farce, comedy, tragedy, drama, and medieval mystery are discernible. The emergence of the concept is natural (V. Dneprov (cm. CITY OF MILITARY GLORY)), according to which the novel is the fourth - in relation to the epic, lyrics and drama - a kind of literature.
The novel is a multilingual, multidimensional and multi-perspective genre, representing the world and man in the world from various, including multi-genre points of view, including other genre worlds as the object of the image. The novel preserves in its meaningful form the memory of myth and ritual (the city of Macondo in the novel by G. García Márquez (cm. GARCIA MARCES Gabrielle)"One Hundred Years of Solitude"). Therefore, being a "standard bearer and herald of individualism" (Viach. Ivanov (cm. IVANOV Vyacheslav Ivanovich)), the novel in a new form (in a written word) simultaneously seeks to resurrect primitive syncretism (cm. SYNCRETISM) words, sound and gesture (hence the organic birth of cinema and TV novels), to restore the original unity of man and the universe.
The problem of the place and time of the birth of the novel remains controversial. According to both the extremely broad and extremely narrow interpretation of the essence of the novel - an adventure story focused on the fate of lovers seeking to unite - the first novels were created in ancient India and regardless of that - in Greece (cm. ANCIENT GREECE) and Rome (cm. ANCIENT ROME) in the II-IV centuries. The so-called Greek (Hellenistic) novel is the chronologically first version of the "adventure novel of the ordeal" (M. Bakhtin (cm. BAKHTIN Mikhail Mikhailovich)) lies at the origins of the first stylistic line in the development of the novel, which is characterized by "monolingualism and monostyle" (in the English-language criticism of the narrative of this kind are called romance).
The action in "romance" takes place in t "adventurous time", which is removed from real (historical, biographical, natural) time and is a kind of "gaping" (Bakhtin (cm. BAKHTIN Mikhail Mikhailovich)) between the initial and final points of the development of the cyclical plot - two moments in the life of the heroes-lovers: their meeting, marked by a sudden outbreak of mutual love, and their reunion after separation and each of them overcoming various kinds of trials and temptations.
The gap between the first meeting and the final reunion is filled with events such as pirate attacks, bride kidnapping during a wedding, sea ​​storm, fire, shipwreck, miraculous salvation, false news of the death of one of the lovers, imprisonment on false charges of another, threatening him with the death penalty, the ascension of another to the heights of earthly power, an unexpected meeting and recognition. The artistic space of the Greek novel is an "alien", exotic, world: events take place in several Middle Eastern and African countries, which are described in sufficient detail (the novel is a kind of guide to an alien world, a replacement for a geographical and historical encyclopedia, although it contains a lot of fantastic information).
The key role in the development of the plot in the antique novel is played by chance, as well as various kinds of dreams and predictions. The characters and feelings of the characters, their appearance and even age remain unchanged throughout the development of the plot. The Hellenistic novel is genetically related to myth, Roman justice and rhetoric. Therefore, in such a novel there is a lot of reasoning on philosophical, religious and moral topics, speeches, including those delivered by the heroes at the trial and built according to all the rules of ancient rhetoric: the adventure-love plot of the novel is also a judicial "incident", the subject of its discussion from two diametrically opposed points of view, pro and contra (this contraversion, conjugation of opposites will remain as a genre feature of the novel at all stages of its development).
In Western Europe, the Hellenistic novel, forgotten during the Middle Ages, was rediscovered in the Renaissance by the authors of the late Renaissance poetics, created by admirers of the same rediscovered and read Aristotle (cm. ARISTOTLE)... Trying to adapt Aristotelian poetics (which says nothing about the novel) to the needs modern literature with its rapid development of various kinds fictional narratives, neo-aristotelian humanists turned to the Greek (as well as the Byzantine) novel as an ancient example-precedent, being guided by which, a believable narrative should be created (truthfulness, authenticity is a new quality prescribed in the humanistic poetics of the novel fiction). The recommendations contained in the neo-Aristotelian treatises were largely followed by the creators of pseudo-historical adventure romance novels of the Baroque era (M. de Scuderi (cm. SKUDERIE Madeleine de) and etc.).
The plot of the Greek novel is not only exploited in mass literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. (in the same Latin American TV novels), but it is also seen in the plot collisions of "high" literature in the novels of Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, Dostoevsky, A. N. Tolstoy (trilogy "Sisters", "Walking through the agony", "The Eighteenth Year") , Andrey Platonov ("Chevengur"), Pasternak ("Doctor Zhivago"), although they often parody ("Candide" by Voltaire) and radically rethink (the purposeful destruction of the mythologeme "sacred wedding" in the prose of Andrey Platonov and G. García Márquez ).
But the novel is not reducible to the plot. A truly novel hero is not limited to a plot: he, in the words of Bakhtin, is always either "more plot or less than his humanity." He is not only and not so much an “external person”, realizing himself in action, in an act, in a rhetorical word addressed to everyone and anyone, as an “internal person” aimed at self-knowledge and at a confessional-prayer appeal to God and a specific “other”: such a person was discovered by Christianity (Epistles of the Apostle Paul, "Confessions" of Aurelius Augustine (cm. AUGUSTIN the Blessed)), which paved the way for the formation of the European novel.
The novel, as a biography of the "inner man", began to take shape in Western European literature in the form of a poetic and then a prose knightly novel (cm. ROMANCE) 12-13 centuries. - the first narrative genre The Middle Ages, perceived by authors and educated listeners and readers as fiction, although by tradition (also becoming the subject of a parody game) it was often passed off as the works of ancient "historians". At the heart of the plot collision of the chivalric romance, the indestructible confrontation of the whole and the separate, chivalrous community (the mythical chivalry of the times of King Arthur (cm. ARTHUR (legendary king))) and the hero-knight, who stands out among others for his merits, and - according to the principle of metonymy - is the best part of the knightly estate. In the knightly deed intended for him from above and in the love service of Eternal femininity, the hero-knight must rethink his place in the world and in society, divided into estates, but united by Christian, universal values. The knightly adventure is not just a test of the hero for self-identity, but also the moment of his self-knowledge.
Fiction, adventure as a test of self-identity and as a path to self-knowledge of the hero, a combination of motives of love and heroism, the interest of the author and readers of the novel to the inner world of the characters - all these are characteristic genre signs of a chivalric novel, "supported" by the experience of a "Greek" of the novel, at the end of the Renaissance they will pass into the novel of the New Age, parodying the epic of chivalry and at the same time preserving the ideal of chivalry as a value reference ("Don Quixote" by Cervantes).
The cardinal difference between the novel of the New Age and the novel of the Middle Ages is the transfer of events from the fabulous-utopian world (the chronotope of the chivalrous novel is "a wonderful world in an adventurous time", according to Bakhtin's definition) into recognizable "prosaic" modernity. One of the first (along with Cervantes' novel) genre varieties of the new European novel is oriented towards the modern, "low" reality - the rogue novel (cm. PLUTOVSKY ROMAN)(or picaresque), which developed and flourished in Spain in the second half of the 16th - first half of the 17th century. ("Lasarillo with Tormesa (cm. LASARILLO WITH TORMESA)», Mateo Aleman (cm. ALEMAN-I-DE-ENERO Mateo), F. de Quevedo (cm. QUEEDO-I-VILLIEGAS Francisco)... Genetically, picaresque is associated with the second stylistic line of development of the novel, according to Bakhtin (cf. the English term novel as the opposite of romance). It is preceded by the "grassroots" prose of antiquity and the Middle Ages, which never took the form of a proper novel narrative, to which Apuleius's "The Golden Donkey" belongs (cm. APULEY), "Satyricon" Petronius (cm. PETRONY Guy), menipppei of Lucian (cm. LUKIAN) and Cicero (cm. CICERO), medieval fablio (cm. FABLIO), schwanki (cm. SHVANK), farces (cm. FARS (in the theater)), soti (cm. SOTY) and other laughing genres associated with the carnival (carnivalized literature, on the one hand, opposes the “internal man” to the “external man”, on the other hand, to the person as a socialized being (the “official” image of a person, according to Bakhtin), a natural, private, everyday person. The first example of the rogue genre - the anonymous story "The Life of Lasarillo from Tormes" (1554) - parodically oriented towards the genre of confession and built as a pseudo-confessional narration on behalf of the hero, aimed not at repentance, but at self-praise and self-justification (Denis Diderot (cm. DIDRO Denis) and "Notes from the Underground" by F. M. Dostoevsky). The author-ironist, hiding behind the hero-narrator, stylizes his fiction as a “human document” (it is characteristic that all four surviving editions of the story are anonymous). Later, genuine autobiographical narratives (The Life of Estebanillo Gonzalez), already stylized as rogue novels, would branch off from the picaresque genre. At the same time, the picaresque, having lost its own novel properties, will turn into an allegorical satirical epic (B. Gracian).
The first examples of the novel genre reveal a specific novel attitude towards fiction, which becomes the subject of an ambiguous game between the author and the reader: on the one hand, the novelist invites the reader to believe in the authenticity of the life he depicts, to immerse himself in it, to dissolve in the stream of what is happening and in the experiences of the heroes, on the other - every now and then ironically emphasizes the fiction, the co-creation of the novel's reality. Don Quixote is a novel in which the defining beginning is the dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the author and the reader, which passes through it. The rogue novel is a kind of denial of the "ideal" world of novels of the first stylistic line - chivalrous, pastoral, "Moorish". Don Quixote, parodying chivalric romances, includes the novels of the first stylistic line as objects of the image, creating parody (and not only) images of the genres of these novels. The world of Cervantes' narrative splits into “book” and “life”, but the border between them is blurred: the hero of Cervantes lives his life as a novel, brings a conceived, but not written novel to life, becoming the author and co-author of the novel of his life, while the author under the mask of the dummy Arab historian Sid Ahmet Benenheli - he becomes a character in the novel, without leaving at the same time his other roles - the author-publisher and the author-creator of the text: starting with the prologue to each of the parts, he is the interlocutor of the reader, who is also invited to join the game with the text of the book and the text of life. Thus, the “quixotic situation” unfolds in the stereometric space of the tragic-farsighted “novel of consciousness”, in the creation of which three main subjects are involved: Author - Hero - Reader. In Don Quixote, for the first time in European culture, a "three-dimensional" novelistic word sounded - the most striking feature of novelistic discourse.
Just as the novel by Cervantes combines both stylistic lines of development of the novel, the traditions of rhetorical and carnival discourses, the English novelists of the Enlightenment (D. Defoe (cm. DEFO Daniel), G. Fielding (cm. FILING Henry), T. Smollett (cm. SMOLLETT Tobias George)) reconcile the initially incompatible novel of the "Cervantes type" and picarescu, creating a "novel big road", Which, in turn, absorbs the experience that originated in early Renaissance Italy (" Fiametta "Boccaccio (cm. Boccaccio Giovanni)) and finally took shape in France in the 17th century. ("The Princess of Cleves" M. de Lafayette (cm. Lafayette Marie Madeleine)) a psychological novel, as well as features of an idyll. Traditions of the English love-sentimental and family-everyday novel of the Enlightenment (S. Richardson (cm. RICHARDSON Samuel), O. Goldsmith (cm. GOLDSMITH Oliver)) will be picked up by novelists of the 19-20 century. Having absorbed, in turn, the experience that also took shape in England under the pen of W. Scott (cm. SCOTT Walter) historical novel, in a specifically Russian cultural context, the genre of the epic novel (L.N. artistic structure two opposites - the epic and the novel, once again confirming the fundamental feature of the novel - its essential contraversion and the dialectic of its internal form.
The novel's ability to constantly self-renew itself throughout its life in the culture of the New and Newest times is confirmed by the regular appearance of parody novels of certain examples of the genre gravitating towards canonization: the parody and self-parody beginning is present in the prose of Fielding, Stern (cm. STERN Lawrence), Wieland (cm. VILAND Christophe Martin), Dickens, M. Twain (cm. TVEN Mark), Joyce (cm. JOYCE James), Pushkin (cm. Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich), Dostoevsky, Nabokov (cm. NABOKOV Vladimir Vladimirovich), G. García Márquez, etc. Most of the parody and self-parody novels can be called “self-conscious novels” or metaromaniacs, that is, texts based on parodic quotations and ironic rethinking of other people's texts. At the origins of this tradition is also the first "exemplary" novel of the modern era - "Don Quixote".
The diversity of the novel tradition, reflecting the inexhaustibility of the genre itself, is also manifested in the emergence of specific national varieties of the genre: the "novel of education" in Germany (Goethe (cm. Goethe Johann Wolfgang), T. Mann ( cm.

Literary genres are groups of works that are distinguished within the framework of the genres of literature. Each of them has a certain set of stable properties. Many literary genres have their origins and roots in folklore. The genres that have re-emerged in literary experience proper are the fruit of the aggregate activity of initiators and successors. Such, for example, is the lyric-epic poem formed in the era of romanticism.

Genres are difficult to systematize and classify (in contrast to the genres of literature), stubbornly resist them. First of all, because there are a lot of them: in each artistic culture genres are specific (hokku, tanka, gazelle in the literatures of the countries of the East). In addition, genres have different historical volumes. Some have existed throughout the history of verbal art (such as, for example, a fable, eternally alive from Aesop to S.V. Mikhalkov); others are correlated with certain epochs (such is, for example, the liturgical drama in the European Middle Ages). In other words, genres are either universal or historically local.
The picture becomes more complicated also because the same word often denotes genre phenomena that are deeply different. Thus, the ancient Greeks thought of an elegy as a work written in a strictly defined poetic size - an elegiac distichus (a combination of a hexameter with a pentameter) and performed in a recitative to the accompaniment of a flute. And in the second half of the XVIII - early XIX in. The elegiac genre, thanks to T. Gray and VA Zhukovsky, began to be determined by the mood of sadness and sadness, regret and melancholy.

authors often designate the genre of their works arbitrarily, outside of the usual word usage. So, N.V. Gogol called Dead Souls a poem; "House by the Road" by A.T. Tvardovsky has a subtitle "lyrical chronicle", "Vasily Terkin" - "a book about a soldier."

Consideration of genres is unimaginable without referring to the organization, structure, and form of literary works.

G.N. Pospelov distinguished between genre forms "external" ("closed compositional-stylistic whole") and "internal" ("specific genre content" as a principle " figurative thinking Evaluating the external (compositional and stylistic) genre forms as meaningfully neutral (in this Pospelov's concept of genres, which has been repeatedly noted, is one-sided and vulnerable), the scientist focused on the inner side of genres. genre groups, based on the sociological principle of their differentiation: the type of relationship between the artistically comprehended person and society, the social environment in broad sense... "If works of national-historical genre content (meaning epics, epics, odes. - V.Kh.), - wrote GN Pospelov, - learn life in the aspect of the formation of national societies, private relations, then works of "ethological" genre content reveal the state of the national society or some part of it. " ("Travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow" by AN Radishchev, "Who Lives Well in Russia" by NA Nekrasov).

NOVEL
The novel, recognized as the leading genre of literature of the last two or three centuries, attracts close attention of literary scholars and critics.

If in the aesthetics of classicism the novel was treated as a low genre, then in the era of romanticism it rose to the shield as a reproduction of "everyday reality" and at the same time "a mirror of the world and<...>of his century, "the fruit" of a fully mature spirit

Hegel: the novel lacks the "initially poetic state of the world" inherent in the epic; it contains "prosaically ordered reality" and "the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the prose of everyday relations opposed to it." V.G.Belinsky, who called the novel an epic privacy: the subject of this genre is "the fate of a private person", ordinary, "everyday life".

MM. Bakhtin: the hero of the novel is shown "not as ready and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, brought up by life"; this person "should not be" heroic "neither in the epic nor in the tragic sense of the word, the romantic hero combines both positive and negative traits, both low and high, both funny and serious. "At the same time, the novel captures the" living contact "of a person" with an unprepared, becoming modernity (unfinished present). "And he is" more deeply, substantially, sensitively and quickly ", than any other genre, “reflects the formation of reality itself.” The main thing is that the novel (according to Bakhtin) is capable of discovering in a person not only properties determined in behavior, but also unrealized possibilities, a certain personal potential

The novel invariably contains and almost dominates - as a kind of "super theme" - artistic comprehension (we will use the well-known words of A.S. Pushkin) "self-permanence of man", which is (let us add the poet) and "the guarantee of his greatness" and the source of grievous falls, dead ends and catastrophes. The ground for the formation and consolidation of the novel, in other words, arises where there is interest in a person who has at least relative independence from the institutions of the social environment

The novels widely depict situations of the hero's alienation from the environment, accentuating his lack of root in reality, homelessness, everyday wandering and spiritual wandering. Eugene Onegin ("A stranger to everything, is not bound by anything," the Pushkin hero complains about his fate in a letter to Tatyana), Raskolnikov at F.M. Dostoevsky

in novels, a significant role is played by heroes, whose independence has nothing to do with the solitude of consciousness, alienation from the environment, relying only on themselves. Among the characters in the novel, we find those who, using the words of M.M. Prishvin about himself, it is legitimate to call "figures of communication and communication." Such is Natasha Rostova, "overflowing with life". In a number of novels (especially persistently in the works of Charles Dickens and the Russian literature XIX c.) the spiritual contacts of a person with a reality close to him and, in particular, family and clan relations are presented in an uplifting and poetic manner (" Captain's daughter"AS Pushkin). The heroes of such works perceive and think the surrounding reality not so much alien and hostile to themselves, as friendly and akin. They are characterized by what MM Prishvin called" kindred attention to the world. "
The theme of the house sounds in the novels of our century: J. Galsworthy ("The Forsyte Saga" and subsequent works), MA Bulgakov ("The White Guard"), MA Sholokhov (" Quiet Don"),

This genre is capable of incorporating features of the epic into its sphere, capturing not only the private life of people, but also events of a national-historical scale (Stendhal's "Parma monastery"). Novels are able to embody the meanings characteristic of the parable. According to O.A. Sedakova, "in the depths" of the Russian novel "there is usually something like a parable."
The involvement of the novel in the traditions of hagiography is undoubted. The life principle is very clearly expressed in the work of Dostoevsky. Leskovsky's "Soboryans" can rightfully be described as a novel-life.

Novels often take on the features of satirical moral description, such as, for example, the works of O. de Balzac, W.M. Thackeray

The novel, as you can see, has a twofold content: firstly, specific to him ("self-constancy" and the evolution of the hero, manifested in his private life), and secondly, which came to him from other genres. The conclusion is legitimate; the genre essence of the novel is synthetic. This genre is capable of combining, with unconstrained freedom and unprecedented breadth, the substantive principles of many genres, both comic and serious. Apparently, there is no genre beginning from which the novel would remain fatally alienated.
The novel, as a genre prone to synthetics, is sharply different from others that preceded it, which were "specialized" and acted on certain local "areas" of artistic comprehension of the world. He (like no other) proved to be able to bring literature closer to life in its diversity and complexity, contradictions and wealth. Novel freedom to explore the world has no boundaries. And writers from different countries and eras enjoy this freedom in a variety of ways.

In the long history of the novel, two of its types are clearly visible. These are, firstly, highly eventful works based on external action, the heroes of which strive to achieve some local goals. These are adventurous novels, in particular, roguish, chivalrous, "career romances", as well as adventure and detective novels. Their plots are numerous links of event nodes (intrigues, adventures, etc.), as is the case, for example, in A. Dumas.
Secondly, these are novels that have prevailed in literature for the last two or three centuries, when one of central concerns public thought, artistic creation and culture as a whole has become the spiritual self-permanence of man. Internal action successfully competes with external action: eventfulness is noticeably weakened, and the consciousness of the hero in its versatility and complexity comes to the fore.

One of the most important features of the novel and a related story (especially in the 19th-20th centuries) is the close attention of the authors to the microenvironment surrounding the heroes, the influence of which they experience and on which they influence in one way or another.

In this article, we'll talk about how a novel differs from a story. First, let's define these genres, and then compare them.

and the story

A rather large art novel is called a novel. This genre belongs to the epic. There can be several main characters, and their lives are directly connected with historical events. In addition, the novel tells about the whole life of the characters, or about some significant part of it.

The story is literary work in prose, which usually tells about some important episode in the hero's life. Acting characters usually a little, and only one of them is the main one. Also, the volume of the story is limited and should not exceed about 100 pages.

Comparison

And yet, how does a novel differ from a story? Let's start with the novel form. So, this genre assumes the image of large-scale events, the versatility of the plot, a very long time frame that includes the entire chronology of the narrative. The novel has one main storyline and several subplots, which are closely intertwined into a compositional whole.

The ideological component is manifested in the behavior of the heroes, the disclosure of their motives. The novel takes place against a historical or everyday descriptive background, touching upon a wide range of psychological, ethical and ideological problems.

The novel has several subspecies: psychological, social, everyday, adventure, detective, etc.

Now let's take a closer look at the story. In works of this genre, the development of events is limited to a specific place and time. The personality of the protagonist and fate is revealed in 1-2 episodes, which are turning points for his life.

There is only one plot in the story, but it can have several unexpected turns that give it diversity and depth. All actions are associated with the main character. In such works there are no pronounced links to history or socio-cultural events.

The problematic of prose is much narrower than in the novel. Usually it is associated with morality, ethics, personal development, manifestation personal qualities in extreme and unusual conditions.

The story is subdivided into subgenres: detective, fantastic, historical, adventure, etc. A psychological story is rarely found in literature, but satirical and fabulous ones are very popular.

How a novel differs from a story: conclusions

Let's summarize:

• The novel reflects social and historical events, and in the story they serve only as a background for the narrative.
• The life of the characters in the novel is presented in a socio-psychological or historical context. And in the story, the image of the protagonist can be revealed only in certain circumstances.
• In the novel, there is one main plot and several minor ones that form a complex structure. The story in this regard is much simpler and not complicated by additional plot lines.
• The novel takes place over a long period of time, and the story takes place in a very limited one.
• Novel issues include big number questions, and the story touches on only a few of them.
• The heroes of the novel express ideological and social ideas, and in the story is important inner world character and his personality traits.

Novels and Novels: Examples

We list the works that are:

• Belkin's Tale (Pushkin);
• "Spring Waters" (Turgenev);
• Poor Liza (Karamzin).

Among the novels are the following:

• "Noble Nest" (Turgenev);
• The Idiot (Dostoevsky);
• Anna Karenina (L. Tolstoy).

So, we found out how the novel differs from the story. In short, the difference comes down to the scale of the literary work.