Social Novel

4 Key excerpts on "Social Novel"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Long Revolution

  • Raymond Williams(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Parthian Books

    (Publisher)

  We now commonly make this distinction between ‘social’ and ‘personal’ novels; indeed in one way we take this distinction of interest for granted. By looking at some examples, the substantial issue may be made clear. There are now two main kinds of ‘social’ novel. There is, first, the descriptive Social Novel, the documentary. This creates, as priority, a general way of life, a particular social or working community. Within this, of course, are characters, sometimes quite carefully drawn. But what we say about such novels is that if we want to know about life in a mining town, or in a university, or on a merchant ship, or on a patrol in Burma, this is the book. In fact many novels of this kind are valuable; the good documentary is usually interesting. It is right that novels of this kind should go on being written, and with the greatest possible variety of setting. Yet the dimension that we miss is obvious: the characters are miners, dons, soldiers first; illustrations of the way of life. It is not the emphasis I have been trying to describe, in which the persons are of absolute interest in themselves, and are yet seen as parts of a whole way of living. Of all current kinds of novel, this kind, at its best, is

  apparently nearest to what I am calling the realist novel, but the crucial distinction is quite apparent in reading: the social-descriptive function is in fact the shaping priority.

  A very lively kind of Social Novel, quite different from this, is now significantly popular. The tenor, here, is not description, but the finding and materialisation of a formula about society. A particular pattern is abstracted, from the sum of social experience, and a society is created from this pattern. The simplest examples are in the field of the future-story, where the ‘future’ device (usually only a device, for nearly always it is obviously contemporary society that is being written about; indeed this is becoming the main way of writing about social experience) removes the ordinary tension between the selected pattern and normal observation.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Moral Electricity of Print

  Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women's Circuit, 1876-1910

  • Ronald Briggs(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Vanderbilt University Press

    (Publisher)

  This chapter will focus on the theoretical contribution this group of writers made to the question of the novel and the novelist’s role in society. First, I will frame their vision globally, tracing the development of the idea of the Social Novel as a reaction to a particular vision of French naturalism and particular readings of foreign authors such as Leo Tolstoy and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Conducted against the constant backdrop of debates on just how “moral” or “social” the novel should seek to be—Juan Valera versus Emilia Pardo Bazán in Spain, Walter Besant versus Henry James in Great Britain and the United States—this question and Lima’s relationship to it moves at the speed of reading and translation rather than the chronology of composition and publication dates. Lima’s combination of provincialism and connection to the global world of literature makes it possible for Stowe, whose major works had been published decades before, to share the stage with Flaubert, Pardo Bazán, and Tolstoy, who were themselves in the process of writing novels and articulating the aesthetic and social goals to which they believed the genre should aspire. Finally, all four writers combine an intensely localized American anxiety about corruption as a corrosive political force with a self-conscious vision of themselves as practitioners of a global literary form. In plots that often mimicked the educational narratives I have already explored, they proposed individual struggles as allegories or even specific remedies for inequality and injustice, always imagining their own hemisphere as the last, best hope for such remedies to take hold.

  Gender, I will argue, plays a role in the theory of the Social Novel similar to that already seen in biographical collections and educational writings, in which a reified traditional notion of female identity serves as a lever for vastly expanded public influence. Just as the proponents of women’s education anticipated their readers’ bias by basing their argument at least in part on women’s role in raising sons , so the Social Novel would elevate the female novelist as a moral redeemer of a society in which male-dominated politics has become hopelessly corrupt. Assiduous readers of Germaine de Staël, the novelists of the Lima group saw literature as a route around traditional barriers to women as participants in politics. This elevation of the novelist as a kind of public moral educator also depended on a synthesis of literary aesthetics and pedagogical technique. The new Social Novel was an aesthetic project aimed at eliciting precisely prescribed reactions from its readers. Thus the three theoretical arcs explored so far—ideological Americanism, gender emancipation, and the fusion of education and literary aesthetics—all play an essential role in this particular conception of the Social Novel. Written from a locus of Spanish American crisis with the full consciousness of a growing world literary market, these novels and their theories seek to create the role of novelist-teacher and to suggest or overtly argue that women are particularly well suited to exercise it. Having chosen literature as the field most open for female participation in the public sphere and having practiced and theorized a formulation of the Social Novel that turned many of the conventional stereotypes about that feminine sphere into sources of authority, the women authors of the Lima circle found their own standing bound up in the debate over what the novel should do. The stakes in the debate over the Social Novel therefore encompassed not only a way of writing they sought to popularize, but also their own status as writers and public figures.2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Protest and Reform

  The British Social Narrative by Women 1827–1867

  • Joseph Kestner(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Many of these women did extensive research, familiarizing themselves with data and social documentation. All challenged the idea that novel reading was a superficial activity. Instead, demanding that their readers confront social realities, they elevated the seriousness of the novel as a literary form. This book is therefore concerned with two central issues: the role of women protest writers in a period of economic transition; and the revision of the canon of female authorship during the nineteenth century. Elaine Showalter has noted that “the ongoing history of women’s writing has been suppressed, leaving large and mysterious gaps in accounts of the development of genre” (“Feminist” 33). Studying one segment of this development of a genre during the nineteenth century—the social narrative by women – makes it evident that a redefinition and revaluation of fictional prose is necessary. Women form an interlocking chain of contributions in creating the genre of the social narrative, integrating and perfecting its use of statistical and governmental evidence in conjunction with personal experience to advance reform during the nineteenth century in Britain.

  While the origin of social fiction antedates Thomas Carlyle’s essay Chartism (1839), the basic function of this fiction accords with Carlyle’s behest in the opening chapter of his monograph, “Condition-of-England Question”: “A feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done, in regard to it. And surely, at an epoch of history when the ‘National Petition’ carts itself in wagons along the streets, and is presented ... to a Reformed House of Commons; and Chartism numbered by the million and half . . . breaks out into brickbats, cheap pikes, and even into sputterings of conflagrations, such very general feeling cannot be considered unnatural! To us individually this matter appears, and has for many years appeared, to be the most ominous of all practical matters whatever; a matter in regard to which if something be not done, something will do

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Citizen's Voice

  Twentieth-Century Politics and Literature

  • Michael Keren(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • University of Calgary Press

    (Publisher)

  7 Despite their cultural and political differentiation, today's members of mass society do not differ from the idealized citizens of the past in their need to formulate conceptions of public significance and, just like them, they do not develop these conceptions only as actors in the market or as subjects of the state. Nor can they be seen to be influenced merely by the mass media they consume. The individual who steps into a government office develops awareness about the way individuals are treated there, and about the dissonance between the actual and desired treatment -residing at the core of political theory — as part of a complex process in which novels can be assumed to take part by virtue of their adherence to the private sphere. Novels reflect individual thoughts and feelings in a personalized way which mass media, especially radio call-in shows and television talk shows, imitate but, as has often been revealed, really only appear to. 8 Even a person who is rather conditioned in his or her responses to public affairs by such genres as daytime soap operas cannot entirely avoid the presence of novels. This is because of the convergence that characterizes today's media structures; the novel, the movie, the T-shirt, the theme ride, the video game, etc., are all converging into one media world. 9 The novel may Death of the Novel? / 141 be affected by the convergence, but so is the soap opera, which adopts forms and themes derived from novels, such as the narrative, the moral imperative, or the need to make individual choices at critical moments. In fact, the novel, like other traditional media, seems to have more power than commonly realized to reinvent itself and become a factor in the public sphere.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book