II.

Origins of the Novel

Fiction narratives in prose were composed throughout the ancient world, and to these the term novel has been indiscriminately applied. Many tales that subsequently became part of the European literary tradition originated in Egypt. In India the novel probably can be said to have a precursor in the Daśakumāracarita (Tales of Ten Princes), a prose romance by Dandin, a Sanskrit writer of the late 6th century ad. In Japan what many scholars regard as the first real novel, The Tale of Genji (11th century; trans. 1925-1933), was written by Murasaki Shikibu. What are often now called novels had a considerable vogue among the Greeks in the early centuries of the Christian era. Worthy of mention are the Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus (4th century bc); Daphnis and Chloë, the most exquisite of the pastoral romances, generally attributed to Longus (2nd century ad); and the Aethiopica by Heliodorus of Emesa, Syria (3rd century ad). The chief examples of “novels” written in Latin are the Satyricon, which is generally considered the work of Gaius Petronius Arbiter (1st century ad), and the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius (2nd century ad).

The long narrative verse tale, the equally voluminous prose romance, and the Old French fabliau flourished in Europe during the Middle Ages, contributing to the development of the novel. Advances in realism were made in Spain during the 16th century with the so-called picaresque, or rogue, story, in which the protagonist is a merry vagabond who goes through a series of realistic and exciting adventures. Examples are the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Guzmán de Alfarache (Pt. I, 1599; Pt. II, 1604/The Spanish Rogue, 1623) by Mateo Alemán. In 1605 (Part I) and 1615 (Part II) the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes published what is considered the first great novel of the Western world, Don Quixote (trans. Pt. I, 1612; Pt. II, 1620). It recounts the adventures of a country gentleman driven mad by reading chivalric romances, which he accepts as factual. A further advance in psychological realism was made by the Comtesse de la Fayette in La Princesse de Clèves (1678). In The Pilgrim's Progress (Part I, 1678; Part II, 1684), John Bunyan observes the way of the world and its characters with such brilliance that his religious allegory can be regarded as a realistic novel.