Novel

D

Russia

In Russia, the novel became a weapon against despotic censorship and a vehicle for the expression of ethical and philosophical ideas. Nikolay Gogol attacked serfdom and satirized provincial character types in Dead Souls (1842; trans. 1854). Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a self-professed disciple of Gogol, argued that “human nature is defined by its extremes” and became a great psychologist of the desperate, the abnormal, and the outcast. His Crime and Punishment (1866; trans. 1886), The Idiot (1868; trans. 1887), The Possessed (1871-1872; trans. 1913), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880; trans. 1912) had a deep, worldwide influence on literature and thought.

The most Westernized of 19th-century Russian novelists, Ivan Turgenev, described in delicate impressionistic style the lives of people of goodwill frustrated by tsardom in such novels as Fathers and Sons (1862; trans. 1867) and Virgin Soil (1877; trans. 1877). Leo Tolstoy was unrivalled, in novels such as War and Peace (1865-1869; trans. 1886) and Anna Karenina (1875-1877; trans. 1886), in the representation of the life of instinct and domestic affections; but he wrote in ceaseless quest of a deeper meaning to life than that given by the instincts and domestic affections alone.

V

The 20th Century: Exploration and Experimentation

The psychological and philosophical themes of later 19th-century novelists were brought to a peak of development by three great early 20th-century figures: Marcel Proust; Thomas Mann; and James Joyce. Proust, in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1932), undertook one of the most ambitious of all literary efforts. In this series of novels Proust minutely analysed the nature of memory and obsessive love in the context of a complex and changing society. Symbolic representations of the problems of modern Europe were combined with psychological insight and a masterly range of cultural understanding in Mann's novels Buddenbrooks (1901; trans. 1904) and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927). Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is based on the Odyssey of Homer, but the action takes place during a single day in modern Dublin. At times the mental lives of the characters are revealed by the technical device known as “stream of consciousness”, by which the unceasing flux of thoughts and associations, conscious and otherwise, is rendered. Ulysses, a work of enormous learning, is a comic masterpiece that carried realism further than it had hitherto been taken. These three novelists thus took the novel to what are still felt to be limits: Proust, in social analysis and exhaustive personal reminiscence; Mann, in broad cultural and philosophical concern; and Joyce, in psychological realism and technical experimentation.

Other European novelists of this century joined Mann in depicting their characters as advocates or embodiments of philosophical ideas. Among modern philosopher-novelists were Hermann Hesse (Der Steppenwolf, 1927; trans. 1929) and the French writers André Gide (La Symphonie Pastorale, 1919/trans. 1931; Les Faux-Monnayeurs, 1926/The Counterfeiters, 1927), François Mauriac (Le Noeud de Vipères, 1932/Vipers’ Tangle, 1933), André Malraux (La Condition humaine, 1933/Man’s Fate, 1934), Jean-Paul Sartre (La Nauseé, 1938/Nausea, 1949), and Albert Camus (La Peste, 1947/The Plague, 1948). Later French novelists, in what came to be known as the nouveau roman, or “new novel”, tried to capture all the complexities of human existence, portraying characters primarily through their relationship to external objects. The best known of these was Alain Robbe-Grillet (La Jalousie, 1957; trans. 1959).

The haunting, dream-like narratives of the Austrian writer Franz Kafka (Der Prozess, 1925/The Trial, 1937; Das Schloss, 1926/The Castle, 1930) mark him, like his heroes, as a man apart. The French-writing Irishman Samuel Beckett (Molloy, 1951; Malone Dies, 1951) resembles Kafka in his parables of human futility and Joyce in his love of wordplay.

In Russia, Tolstoy's influence on later writers was reinforced by Marxist aesthetics. Maksim Gorki (Mother, 1907; trans. 1929), Mikhail Sholokhov (The Silent Don, 4 vol., 1928-1940/And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea, 1934 and 1940), and Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago, 1956; trans. 1958) continued to deal with the interrelationships of personal problems and political events. The Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, 1955; Pale Fire, 1962), who wrote in German and in English, spurned the moral and philosophical concerns of Tolstoy for an aestheticism suggestive of Proust.

Since the end of World War II, the fiction of an increasing number of Latin American writers has attracted great attention. Among novelists widely read in English translation are the Argentine Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch, 1963; trans. 1966), the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez (Cien años de soledad, 1967/One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. A vital contribution to the novel has also been made by African novelists. The Nigerian Chinua Achebe published his ground-breaking Things Fall Apart in 1958, while South African writers Nadine Gordimer (July’s People, 1981; Get a Life, 2005) and J.M. Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians, 1980; Disgrace, 1999) had their achievements honoured with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991 and 2003 respectively. Other prize-winning novelists whose works are widely available in English translation include the Albanian Ismail Kadaré, winner of the first International Booker Prize in 2005, and the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006.

A

Britain

“The historian of fine consciences” was what Joseph Conrad called Henry James, an appropriate enough description for Conrad himself. He was the novelist of extreme situations, of man striving to be loyal to an ideal conception of himself, as in Lord Jim (1900). A naturalized British subject, born in Poland, Conrad was a sailor for 20 years, and these experiences gave him the material for much of his work; he celebrated the life of the sea and the exotic East with an eloquence unsurpassed. In his great novel, Nostromo (1904), he turns an imaginary South American country—prey to the forces of nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, imperialism, and commercial exploitation—into a microcosm of the modern world.

Conrad showed the futility of all human action. He was philosophically and temperamentally at odds with his English contemporaries, H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale (1908) and the Clayhanger trilogy (1910-1915) showed the effects of environment—the industrial English Midlands—on his characters; Wells, a man bristling with ideas, preached in novels of immense liveliness and comic invention (for example, Tono-Bungay, 1909) the gospel of education and scientific progress.

By 1914, among progressive thinkers, faith in the social sciences had been displaced, at least temporarily, by psychoanalysis and its insights into irrational impulses in human behaviour. The theory of the Oedipus complex (thought by Sigmund Freud to be the key to the nature of sexual relations) informs the D. H. Lawrence novel Sons and Lovers (1913). With great lyrical intensity, he narrates the life of a young man's growing up in a coal-mining community. In The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Lawrence explores the nature of female sexuality.

Stream of consciousness mutates into something perhaps more delicate and cerebral than the Joycean in the Virginia Woolf novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). E. M. Forster (Howards End, 1910; A Passage to India, 1924) renders in ironical comedy and delicate symbolism the clash between classes and races.

The post-Joycean, post-war English novel has been criticized for lack of comic inventiveness. Nonetheless, Evelyn Waugh (Decline and Fall, 1928; A Handful of Dust, 1934), Joyce Cary (The Horse's Mouth, 1944), Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954), and Iris Murdoch (A Severed Head, 1961; Nuns and Soldiers, 1981) have variously contributed to the tradition of English comic writing.

Much influenced by cinema, Graham Greene (Brighton Rock, 1938; The Power and the Glory, 1940; The End of the Affair, 1951; The Comedians, 1966) gained worldwide readership for his novels of sinners pursued by a loving God.

Extensive novel-sequences where authors assess their experience by recording lives much like their own were a feature of the immediate post-war period. Particularly noteworthy are Strangers and Brothers (11 vols., 1940-1970) by C.P. Snow; A Dance to the Music of Time (12 vols., 1951-1975) by Anthony Powell; the five Doris Lessing novels published as Children of Violence (1952-1969); and four novels (1966-1975) on the end of British rule in India, by Paul Scott, collectively published as The Raj Quartet.

Although initially post-war writers favoured forms of comic naturalism, from around 1960 a new generation revisited a more formal tradition of innovation and self-consciousness, linked to Sterne, Joyce, and Woolf, among others. Such 1960s writers re-considered ways of conveying reality, many influenced by the nouveau roman and existentialism. B. S. Johnson (Albert Angelo, 1964; The Unfortunates, 1969) explores, literally, everyday life in its obsessive minutiae. John Fowles (The Collector, 1963; The Magus, 1965; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969) situates identity within both pathological motivations and socially challenging actions. Muriel Spark gauges the human spirit and the underlying possibilities for spirituality by focusing on closeted female environments, most notably in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963).

From the 1970s intensely reflexive and comically ironic writers concerned themselves with ethnicity, sexuality, the abandonment of traditional values, mass migrations, consumerism, and advances in communication. Significantly, many during this period blurred the boundaries between literary fiction and genre fiction, creating a more hybrid form. The pathological and ironic characterize J.G. Ballard (Crash, 1973; High-Rise, 1975), who identifies man’s propensity for the sacrificial and violent. Two feminists blend realism and fabulism: Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus, 1984; Wise Children, 1991) and Jeanette Winterson (Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, 1985; The Passion, 1987; Sexing the Cherry, 1989).

Martin Amis, son of Kingsley, satirizes the intensity of banalities and the apocalyptic (Money, 1984; London Fields, 1989; The Information, 1995); Julian Barnes explores the nuances of bourgeois social codes (Metroland, 1980; Arthur and George, 2005); and Graham Swift chronicles individual male crises (Waterland, 1983; Last Orders, 1996). Salman Rushdie considers postcolonial history and identity in Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988). The latter, in depicting the prophet Muhammad comically, evoked worldwide Islamic protest and a fatwa (death sentence) on the author. Iain Sinclair has assumed the role of cartographer of myth and history in contemporary marginal experiences (White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, 1987; Downriver, 1991). The Rabelaisian comedies of the Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh focus on violence, corruption, drugs, and pornography (Trainspotting, 1993; Filth, 1998; Porno, 2002). Zadie Smith adapts the Dickensian grotesque and satirizes the contemporary multicultural world, both in London (White Teeth, 2000) and across the Atlantic (On Beauty, 2005).

Historical narratives remain an important sub-genre. The Pat Barker World War I trilogy, Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995), details war, identity, and struggles for sanity; A. S. Byatt interrelates the fluctuation of values in the impulses of the contemporary and those of the past (Possession, 1990; The Biographer’s Tale, 2000).

Critically regarded throughout his career, Ian McEwan has moved from his early fiction concerned with sexually deviant compulsions to more mature narratives about the nuanced obsessions and perversities underlying quotidian lives startled by unexpected events (The Cement Garden, 1978; Enduring Love, 1997; Atonement, 2001; Saturday, 2005).

B

The United States

American authors in the first half of the 20th century depicted society with a view to reform or revolution. They focused on specific injustices, as did Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906), or on the corrupting effects of capitalist society, as did Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, 1920; Babbitt, 1922), Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy, 1925), John Dos Passos (U.S.A., collected in 1938), James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy, 1935), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939), and Richard Wright (Native Son, 1940). More subjective, with compelling descriptions of the American landscape, are the novels of Willa Cather, which reflect on the gradual disappearance of that landscape and of a way of life in the wake of industrial progress (O Pioneers!, 1913; My Ántonia, 1918; The Professor's House, 1925).

An original use of colloquial language characterized the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925; Tender Is the Night, 1934), Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, 1926; A Farewell to Arms, 1929; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940), Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, 1929), and Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust, 1939). Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby transcends the individual and personifies the ironies of the American dream at a crucial historical moment. The myth-making propensities of American novelists are evident in the works of William Faulkner, particularly in Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Other writers portrayed the decaying South with a perceptive eye for the eccentricities and depths of human character: Katherine Anne Porter (Noon Wine, 1937), Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 1940), Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men, 1946), William Styron (Lie Down in Darkness, 1951), and Eudora Welty (The Ponder Heart, 1954).

After World War II works of great power were published by a group of American-Jewish writers who brought to American fiction a strain from 19th-century Russian fiction: Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948), Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953), Bernard Malamud (The Assistant, 1957), Joseph Heller (Catch-22, 1961), and Philip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959). Black writers who also won acclaim included Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952) and James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953). In 1957, a tale of driving across America by Jack Kerouac, On the Road, came to define and epitomize the Beat generation, while its spirit of rebelliousness and non-conformism heralded the arrival of the more radical 1960s, whose counter-cultural challenges are epitomized by the struggle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched in the bleakly comic Ken Kesey novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). During that decade, the American novel went through a phase of technical and thematic experimentation with a group of writers known variously as the fabulists, metafictionists, or black humorists. Significant novels of this type include the aforementioned One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by John Barth and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The excesses of capitalist gain and the hedonistic lifestyles of the 1980s “yuppies” were captured in a series of novels mainly set in New York, most notably by Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987), Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City, 1984), and Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991). During the last few decades of the 20th century, the American novel was also greatly invigorated by the stories of new immigrants and ethnic or racial minorities who had previously been under-represented. Native Americans Leslie Silko (Ceremony, 1977), Sherman Alexie (Reservation Blues, 1995), and Louise Erdrich (Tracks, 1988) made a significant contribution to the American novel by incorporating elements of myth and oral story-telling into their works. The experience of Hispanic Americans was captured in the works of Ana Castillo (So Far from God, 1993) and Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991). The Korean American Chang-Rae Lee has won great acclaim for novels that capture the experience of immigration to the US and inter-generational clashes (Native Speaker, 1995; A Gesture Life, 1999), while Edwidge Danticat has written of the Haitian immigrant’s plight (Breath, Eyes, Memory, 1995).

Among other significant recent American novelists are John Updike (the four Rabbit novels, 1960-1990), Joyce Carol Oates, a prolific writer of poetry and criticism as well as novels (A Garden of Earthly Delights, 1967; Black Girl/White Girl, 2006), and the Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, who writes of African-American life (Song of Solomon, 1977; Beloved, 1987; Paradise, 1998). Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973; Against the Day, 2006) and Don DeLillo (White Noise, 1985; Underworld, 1997) have to a large extent shaped understanding of the American postmodern novel.

See also articles on the literature of the various nations of the world, such as American Literature; English Literature; Latin American Literature.