See what "Novel (genre)" is in other dictionaries. What is a literary novel? Definition, characteristics and typology of the genre

Novel. History of the term. The problem of the novel. The emergence of the genre. From the history of the genre. Conclusions. The novel as a bourgeois epic. The fate of the theory of the novel. The specificity of the form of the novel. The origin of the novel. The novel's conquest of everyday reality ... Literary encyclopedia

A, male Resp .: Romanovich, Romanovna; colloquial Romanych. Derivatives: Romanka; Romakh; Romash; Romania; Roma; Roma; Romulus. Origin: (Latin Romanus Roman; Roman.) Name days: January 18, February 11, February 16, March 2, March 29, May 15, June 5, June 13, ... ... Dictionary of personal names

Cm … Synonym dictionary

Lacapenus Ρωμανός Α΄ Λακαπήνος Coin of Romanus I Lacapenus ... Wikipedia

novel- ROMAN is one of the freest literary forms, suggesting a huge number of modifications and embracing several main branches narrative genre... In the new European literature under this term usually what rises ... ... Dictionary of literary terms

ROMAN, novel, husband. (French roman). 1. A large-scale narrative work, usually in prose, with a complex and developed plot. Read novels. Get carried away with novels. "Hopeless love is only in novels." Chekhov. Household novel. ... ... Dictionary Ushakova

- (fr.). 1) the so-called, first of all, everything is written. on the romance... 2) the most popular genus epics, which contains a story from the life of some social stratum, characterizing the outstanding features of his life and people. ... ... Dictionary foreign words Russian language

Characteristic Length 14 km Basin Barents Sea Basin of Pechora rivers Watercourse Kozhva estuary · Location 4 ... Wikipedia

Roman II: Roman II Younger Byzantine emperor Roman II (ruler of the Moldavian principality) ... Wikipedia

Roses (Roman de la Rose) is a famous French allegorical poem of the 13th century. or rather two individual works written by various authors in different time, and different in spirit. Of the 22817 poems of the poem, the first 4669 were written in the first third of the XIII century ... Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron

Books

• Roman Zlotnikov (set of 11 books), Roman Zlotnikov. "Special Russian Project" is a series best books Russian fantasy. All books are read in one breath ...
• Roman Glushkov. Series "Russian Science Fiction" (set of 9 books), Roman Glushkov. In the series "Russian Science Fiction" best novels modern Russian science fiction writers... The presented kit includes best works the writer Roman ...

Roman is a large form of the epic genre of modern literature. Its most common features: the image of the Man in complex forms life process, multilinearity of the plot, covering the fate of a number actors, polyphony, hence - a large volume in comparison with other genres. The emergence of a genre or its preconditions is often attributed to antiquity or the Middle Ages. So, they say about the "antique novel" ("Daphnis and Chloe" by Long; "Metamorphoses, or the Golden Donkey" by Apuleius; "Satyricon" by Petronius) and the "knightly novel" ("Tristan and Isolde", 12th century; "Parzifal", 1198 -1210, Wolfram von Eschenbach; Death of Arthur, 1469, Thomas Malory). These prosaic narratives do have some features that bring them closer to the novel in modern sense the words. However, these are similar rather than homogeneous phenomena. In ancient and medieval narrative prose literature there are not a number of those essential properties of content and form that play a decisive role in the novel. It would be more correct to understand the named works of antiquity as special genres of an idyllic ("Daphnis and Chloe") or comic ("Satyricon") story, and consider the stories of medieval knights as a kind of genre of knightly epic in prose. The novel begins to take shape only at the end of the Renaissance. Its origin is associated with that new artistic element, which was originally embodied in the Renaissance novella, more precisely, in special genre"Books of short stories" such as "Decameron" (1350-53) G. Boccaccio. The novel was an epic of private life. If in the previous epic the central role was played by the images of heroes who openly embodied the strength and wisdom of the whole human community, then in the novel the images of ordinary people come to the fore, in whose actions only their individual fate, their personal aspirations are directly expressed. The previous one was based on large historical (even legendary) events, the participants or creators of which were the main characters. Meanwhile, the novel (with the exception of the special form of the historical novel, as well as the epic novel) is based on events of private life and, moreover, usually on facts fictional by the author.

The difference between the novel and the historical epic

The action of the historical epic, as a rule, unfolded in the distant past, a kind of "epic time", while the novel is typical of a connection with living modernity or at least with the most recent past, with the exception of special kind the novel is historical. The epic had above all heroic character, was the embodiment of a high poetic element, the novel acts as prose genre, as an image of everyday, everyday life in all the versatility of its manifestations. More or less conventionally, the novel can be defined as a genre in principle "average", neutral. And this clearly expresses the historical novelty of the genre, because earlier the genres "high" (heroic) or "low" (comic) prevailed, and the genres "medium", neutral, did not receive wide development. The novel was the most complete and complete expression of the art of epic prose. But with all the differences from the previous forms of the epic, the novel is the heir of the ancient and medieval epic literature, a true epic of modern times. On a brand new artistic basis in the novel, as Hegel said, “again the richness and variety of interests, states, characters, life relationships, a wide background of a holistic world. " An individual person no longer acts as a representative of a particular group of people; he acquires his personal destiny and individual consciousness. But at the same time, an individual person is now directly connected not with a limited collective, but with the life of an entire society or even all of humanity. And this, in turn, leads to the fact that artistic development becomes possible and necessary. public life through the prism of the individual fate of a "private" person. The novels of A. Prevo, G. Fielding, Stendhal, M.Yu. Lermontov, C. Dickens, I.S. Turgenev in the personal fates of the main characters reveal the broadest and deepest content of the social life of the era. Moreover, in many novels there is not even a somewhat detailed picture of the life of society as such; the whole image is focused on the private life of the individual. However, since in the new society private life person turned out to be inextricably linked with the whole life of the social whole (even if the person did not act as a politician, leader, ideologist), - completely "private" actions and experiences of Tom Jones (in Fielding), Werther (in Goethe), Pechorin (in Lermontov ), Madame Bovary (for Flaubert) appears as an artistic assimilation of the integral essence of the social world that gave birth to these heroes. Therefore, the novel was able to become a true epic of the modern era and in its most monumental manifestations, as it were, revived the epic genre. The first historical form of the novel, which was preceded by the novella and epic of the Renaissance, was the rogue novel, which developed actively in the late 16th and early 18th centuries (Lasarillo from Tormes, 1554; Francion, 1623, S. Sorel; Simplicissimus, 1669, H.J.C. Grimmelshausen; "Gilles Blaz", 1715-35, A.R. Lesage). Since the end of the 17th century, psychological prose has been developing, which had great value for the formation of the novel (books by F. La Rochefoucauld, J. Labruyere, the story of Marie Lafayette "Princess of Cleves", 1678). Finally, very important role in the formation of the novel played memoir literature 16-17 centuries, in which for the first time the private life and personal experiences of people began to be objectively portrayed (books by Benvenuto Cellini, M. Montaigne); it was the memoirs (or, more precisely, the sailor's travel notes) that served as the basis and stimulus for the creation of one of the first great novels - "Robinson Crusoe" (1719) by D. Defoe.

The novel reaches maturity in the 18th century... One of the earliest genuine examples of the genre is Manon Lescaut (1731) by Prévost. In this novel, the traditions of the rogue novel, psychological prose (in the spirit of Maxim, 1665, La Rochefoucauld) and memoir literature (it is characteristic that this novel originally appeared as a fragment of a multivolume fictional memoir of a certain person) merged into an innovative organic integrity. During the 18th century, the novel conquers a dominant position in literature (in the 17th century it still acts as a lateral, secondary sphere of the art of words). In the novel of the 18th century, two different lines are already developing - the novel of the social and everyday life (Fielding, T. J. Smollett, C. B. Louvet de Couvray) and the more powerful line of the psychological novel (S. Richardson, J. J. Rousseau, L. Stern, I.V. Goethe and others). At the turn of the 18-19th centuries, in the era of romanticism, the genre of the novel is going through a kind of crisis; subjective lyrical character romantic literature contradicts the epic essence of the novel. Many writers of this time (F.R. de Chateaubriand, E.P. de Senancourt, F. Schlegel, Neuvalis, B. Constant) create novels that rather resemble lyric poems in prose. However, at the same time, a special form is flourishing - historical novel, which acts as a kind of synthesis of a novel in its own sense and an epic poem of the past (novels by W. Scott, A. de Vigny, V. Hugo, N. V. Gogol). On the whole, the period of romanticism had a renewing meaning for the novel, prepared for its new rise and flourishing. The second third of the 19th century accounts for classical era novel (Stendhal, Lermontov, O. Balzac, Dickens, W.M. Teckeray, Turgenev, G. Flaubert, G. Maupassant, etc.). A special role is played by the Russian novel of the second half of the 19th century, primarily the novels of Leo Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky. In the work of these greatest writers reaches a qualitatively new level one of the decisive properties of the novel - its ability to embody the universal, all-human meaning in the private destinies and personal experiences of the heroes. Deep psychologism, mastering the subtlest movements of the soul, characteristic of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, not only do not contradict, but, on the contrary, determine this property. Tolstoy, noting that in Dostoevsky's novels "not only we, people who are kindred to him, but foreigners recognize themselves, their souls," explained it this way: "The deeper you scoop, the more common, familiar and dear to everyone" (Tolstoy L.N. literature). The novel by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky influenced the further development of the genre in world literature. Major novelists of the 20th century - T. Mann, A. France, R. Rollan, K. Hamsun, R. Martin du Gard, J. Galsworthy, H. Luxness, W. Faulkner, E. Hemingway, R. Tagore, R. Akutagawa - were direct students and followers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. T. Mann said that Tolstoy's novels "lead us into the temptation to overturn the relationship between novel and epic, as affirmed by school aesthetics, and not consider the novel as a product of the disintegration of the epic, but the epic as a primitive prototype of the novel" (Collected works: In 10 volumes).

In the first post-October years, the idea was popular, according to which the image of the masses should become the main or even the only content in a new, revolutionary novel. However, when this idea was realized, the novel was under the threat of disintegration, it turned into a chain of incoherent episodes (for example, in the works of B. Pilnyak). In the literature of the 20th century, the frequent tendency to limit itself to the image inner peace personality is expressed in attempts to recreate the so-called "stream of consciousness" (M. Proust, J. Joyce, the school of the "new novel" in France). But, devoid of an objectively effective basis, the novel essentially loses its epic nature and ceases to be a novel in the true sense of the word. A novel can really develop only on the basis of a harmonious unity of objective and subjective, external and internal in man. This unity is characteristic of the largest novels of the 20th century - the novels of M.A. Sholokhov, Faulkner, and others.

In diversity genre definitions novel overlooks two large groups: thematic definitions - autobiographical, military, detective, documentary, female, intellectual, historical, maritime, political, adventure, satirical, sentimental, social, fantastic, philosophical, erotic, etc .; structural - novels in verse, novel-pamphlet, novel-parable, novel with a key, novel-saga, novel-feuilleton, novel-box (set of episodes), novel-river, epistolary, etc., up to modern TV novels, photo novels ... The historically established designations of the novel stand apart: antique, Victorian, Gothic, modernist, naturalistic, roguish, educational, knightly, Hellenistic, etc.

The word novel comes from French roman, which means - originally a work in Romance languages.

A novel (French roman or contre roman - a story in the Romance language) is one of the largest narrative prose genres, recreating a comprehensive picture of the life of society at one time or another through a deep analysis of private human destiny, giving characters in their versatility, in development and formation. The novelist focuses on the fate of ordinary people, their everyday, everyday life. Originally, the word "novel" meant a narrative work in a Romance language. Later, this term received its own modern meaning... The main genre features of the novel: assessment of reality from the point of view of one person, interest in the life of an individual, the saturation of the action with conflicts (external and internal), the branching of the plot, analysis wide range life phenomena, a large number of characters, significant time span. MM. Bakhtin identifies three genre features of the novel: 1) stylistic three-dimensionality associated with multilingual consciousness; 2) a radical change in time coordinates literary image; 3) a new zone of construction of a literary image - a zone of maximum contact with the present in its incompleteness. Big role in the formation of the genre of the novel was played by memoir literature, as well as psychological stories.

In Europe, novels were created in the era of antiquity (the antique love story "Ethiopica" by Heliodorus). In the XII-XV centuries. numerous novels of chivalry appear ("Tristan and Isolde" unknown author, The Death of Arthur by T. Mallory). In the XVI-XVII centuries. Adventure and adventure-rogue novels appear (Gilles Blaz by Lesage, Francion by S. Sorel), the source of which is the hero's dangerous adventures with a happy ending.

Then, the focus of attention of the novelists is the conflict between a person and society or the conflict between the main characters. This conflict was considered for the first time in the literature of sentimentalism ("Julia, or New Eloise" by J.J. Rousseau). Then this form of the novel became dominant in the work of Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. The first Russian novels of a new type - the novel in verse "Eugene Onegin" by A.S. Pushkin and the novel by I.A. Goncharova " An ordinary story". Researchers identify fundamental national traits inherent in the Russian novel. So, according to E.Ya. Fesenko, this is “epic (epic) breadth; historicism along with mythologism, deepest drama; the desire to "search through all the questions": social, moral, aesthetic, religious. "

There are various classifications of novels. Thematic: autobiographical, military, historical, political, adventure, adventurous, detective, fantastic, satirical, sentimental, female, love, family and household, upbringing novel, philosophical, intellectual, psychological, etc. Structural: a novel in verse, a pamphlet novel , novel with a key, novel-parable, novel-saga, novel-utopia, novel-feuilleton, novel-box (set of episodes), novel-river (series of novels related common hero or plot), epistolary, teleroman, etc. In addition, there is a historically established classification: antique novel, Victorian, Gothic, roguish, Hellenistic, knightly, naturalistic, educational, modernist.

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

Medieval romance gave the world modern name genre. It comes from Old French romanz. Further development v 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 - love romance.

Specific traits

A novel in literature is a long fictional narration about the life or a moment in the life of the 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 so. 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 personal experience 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:

• The chivalric romance is an epic genre of poetry with 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. Ideal an example of an allegory in literature are fables, and the pinnacle of the allegorical novel was “ The Divine Comedy»Dante Alighieri.

• A romance of manners, or 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 direction in 18th century literature focusing on finding answers to eternal questions. Voltaire's Candide became the pinnacle of the philosophical novel. Philosophy has always played an important role in literature, therefore philosophical novel cannot be limited to the framework of one century. The works of Hesse, Mann and Nietzsche were written much later, but are prominent representatives this direction.
• 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 psychological romance... In fact, he overturned the very definition of the literary genre and today is the dominant type of novel.