Novel is perhaps the most diverse of literary genres and
it is impossible to generalize as that would lead to homogenization. It was born with
the rise of the middle classes in the 18th century with the likes of Richrdson, Fielding
etc. The genesis had steeped it into the Enlightenment logic and rationality. However, a
subversion was always already there in the form of a Swift and a Sterne. The linear and
rationalistic modernity of the novel had its day and social realism ruled in it. The
Romantic period saw the development of the Gothic novel and the Victorian period brought
back the sprawling social narratives.
With Modernism, in
Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, the psychical impulse was foregrounded. Joyce experimented with
the stream of consciousness novel . With the late-modernists and the postmodernists, the
literary avant-garde showed a general propensity towards deconstructing the linear
narrative logic so much so that a kind of anti-novel was born through Burroughs, Beckett
and the French New Novelists like Grillet who decared that the modernist psychological
novel was dead and a new poststructuralist novel of surfaces, leaving out symbolism was
born.
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