The rise of the novel and his characteristics

The rise of the novel and his characteristics The rise of the novel and his characteristics Literature is always linked to the historical social and economic background of a country. Eighteen century was an age of prosperity, commerce, agriculture and industry expanded enormously increasing the national wealth; in politics Parliament became more and more powerful after bloodless revolution, ensured political liberty and freedom of speech. The religious struggle of the previous age ended with the Toleration Act of 1689. The middle classes became stronger and stronger. Literature was no longer under the patronage of the Court; writers supported trough their works politicians and statement in political controversies getting influence and fame while the reading public which was going wader and wader, aloud them financial returns and social states. The novel was the best achievement of the 18th literature because it's the form which most fully reflects the taste of the time, the new tendency of culture and the exceptions of the reading public . In this century the novel, whose primary criteria were independence from the tradition of past thought and faith only in the individual experience , always unique and therefor new , is this the logical literary vehicle of a culture which has set and an enormous value on realism , on originality and individualism .The realism of the novel is part of a much larger movement involving the end of the medieval world ,and a post Renaissance view of men as an individual. Modern realism in fact is based on the firm conviction that truth can be discovered by men through his senses . Personal experience takes the places of collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality. Realism now denotes a belief in the individual apprehension of reality through the senses , which is original ( original with the meaning of “ independent , underived , first hand ) .So a novel is a original representation of a reality as it appears to the individual . To a comply this new literary form, novelists needed some formal innovations. First of all they didn't take their plots from mythology, history legends or previous literature. Their interests rested on reality. The plot and the actors were placed in a new literary prospective: the plot had to be acted by particular people in particular circumstances, rather than by general human tips in a conventional literary background. To stress that the characters were to be regarded as particular individual in the contemporary social environment and not as general type, the novelists of this time used authentic proper names and surnames such as Robinson Cruse or Panel or Tom Jones. The rejected the names, widely used by previous writers (Sidney, Spencer),which carried foreign archaic or literary connotations without referring to real and contemporary life. Another brake with the tradition was the fact that they didn't accept the celebrated unites of time, space and action. The new conten