The concept of genre. Novel as a literary genre. Novel - disassembling it “bone by bone”

Cheat sheet for the writer:

NOVEL as a genre of literature

Novel- literary genre, epic work large shape, in which the narrative is focused on the fate of an individual in his relationship to the world, on the formation, development of his character and self-awareness, most often during a crisis non-standard period of his life. Content novel covers a significant period of time and describes the fates of many characters.

IN novel life is widely depicted, a series of events are smoothly arranged, usually used a large number of heroes who participate in the event series of the work.

Novel gives a talented writer the opportunity to show the progress of the spiritual world of the characters involved, to reveal changes at any period of time, to make some analysis of those conditions that can influence the formation of their characters.

These can be descriptions, a specific disclosure of events, and individual speech characteristic heroes involved in life novel. Hence, the composition of such works is often quite difficult for the reader to perceive.

A convenient example novel The work of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky “Crime and Punishment” can serve as a reference. It complies with the following character traits true novel: contradictory, complex spiritual world the main character is revealed with exhaustive completeness, his development is shown.

The fundamental aspects of the hero’s character are considered in close connection with the social contrasts and sorrows of society as a whole existing in the work. Active participation in dramatic events, are taking on a few more characters.

IN novel acute social and deepest moral philosophical questions are touched upon, which Dostoevsky successfully solves, as a result, the diversity of the life he described gives a complex compositional structure of the entire work: extremely intense, rapidly growing conflict, a clash of opposing ideas, excellent use of dialogues in the work, and much more.

The signs that were given for novel“Crime and Punishment” by F.M. Dostoevsky, are inherent in the following literary works: “Anna Karenina” by Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, “Oliver Twist” performed by Dickens, “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, “Eugene Grande” by Balzac, and other popular novels.

Main types of novel

The proposed classification does not pretend to be complete, which is difficult to achieve when dealing with such a genre as novel. It allows you to combine some novels to draw attention to similarities. Unlike the ancient epic, the medieval knightly novel or, let's say, elegy, novel has always been in constant conflict with existing literary conventions. Always changing the ways of storytelling, novel borrowed elements of style from drama, journalism, popular culture and cinema, never, however, losing the tradition of reportage coming from the 17th century.

Social novel.

This type of narrative focuses on the variety of behaviors accepted in any given society and how the characters' actions respond to or contradict the values ​​of that society. Two types of social novel are descriptive novel and a cultural-historical novel (usually structured as a family story). Their characters are always presented against the backdrop of the cultural standards of their time. Even if the center of the story is inner life heroes, its engine is always their conflicts with outside world, representatives of other classes and beliefs.

M. M. Bakhtin

Epic and novel (On the methodology of researching the novel)

The study of the novel as a genre is characterized by special difficulties. This is due to the uniqueness of the object itself : the novel is the only emerging and not yet ready genre. Genre-forming forces act before our eyes: the birth and formation of the novel genre takes place in the full light of historical day. The genre backbone of the novel is far from solidified, and we cannot yet predict all its plastic possibilities.

We know the remaining genres as genres, that is, as certain solid forms for casting artistic experience, in a ready-made form. The ancient process of their formation lies beyond historically documented observation. We find the epic not only a long-prepared, but already deeply aged genre.. The same can be said, with some reservations, about other major genres, even about tragedy. Their historical life known to us is their life as ready-made genres with a solid and already low-plastic backbone. Each of them has a canon that acts in literature as a real historical force.

All these genres, or at least their basic elements, are much older than writing and books, and they retain their original oral and loud nature to a greater or lesser extent even to this day. Of the large genres, one novel is younger than writing and the book, and it alone is organically adapted to new forms of silent perception, that is, to reading. But the main thing is that the novel does not have such a canon as other genres: only individual examples of the novel are historically effective, but not the genre canon as such. Learning other genres is similar to learning dead languages; the study of the novel is the study of living languages, and young ones at that.

This creates an extraordinary difficulty for the theory of the novel. After all, this theory has, in essence, a completely different object of study than the theory of other genres. The novel is not just a genre among genres. This is the only emerging genre among long-ready and partly already dead genres. This is the only genre born and nurtured new era world history and therefore deeply akin to it, while other large genres were inherited by it in a ready-made form and only adapt - some better, others worse - to new conditions of existence. Compared to them, the novel seems to be a creature of a different breed. It doesn't fit well with other genres. He fights for his dominance in literature, and where he wins, other, old genres decay. No wonder best book on the history of the ancient novel - Erwin Rohde's book - not so much tells its history as depicts the process of decomposition of all great high genres on ancient soil.

The problem of interaction of genres in the unity of literature of a given period is very important and interesting. In some eras - in the classical period of Greek, in the golden age of Roman literature, in the era of classicism - in great literature (that is, in the literature of the dominant social groups) all genres, to a certain extent, harmoniously complement each other and all literature, as a set of genres, is to a large extent an organic whole of a higher order. But it is characteristic: the novel is never included in this whole, it does not participate in the harmony of genres. In these eras, the novel leads an unofficial existence beyond the threshold of great literature. The organic whole of literature, hierarchically organized, includes only ready-made genres with established and defined genre faces. They can be mutually limited and mutually complement each other, maintaining their genre nature. They are united and related to each other in their deep structural features.

The great organic poets of the past - Aristotle, Horace, Boileau - are imbued with a deep sense of the whole of literature and the harmonious combination of all genres in this whole. They seem to specifically hear this harmony of genres. This is the strength, the unique holistic completeness and exhaustion of these poetics. They all consistently ignore the novel. Scientific poetics The 19th century is deprived of this integrity: they are eclectic, descriptive, striving not for living and organic, but for abstract encyclopedic completeness; they are focused not on the actual possibility of the coexistence of certain genres in the living whole of the literature of a given era, but on their coexistence in the most complete anthology. They, of course, no longer ignore the novel, but they simply add it (in a place of honor) to existing genres (as a genre among genres, it is included in the anthology; but the novel enters into the living whole of literature in a completely different way).

The novel, as we have already said, does not fit well with other genres. There can be no talk of any harmony based on mutual differentiation and complementarity. The novel parodies other genres (precisely as genres), exposes the conventionality of their forms and language, displaces some genres, introduces others into its own design, rethinking and reemphasizing them. Literary historians sometimes tend to see this only as a struggle. literary trends and schools. Such a struggle, of course, exists, but it is a peripheral and historically small phenomenon. Behind it, one must be able to see the deeper and historical struggle of genres, the formation and growth of the genre backbone of literature.

Particularly interesting phenomena are observed in those eras when the novel becomes the leading genre. All literature is then embraced by the process of formation and a kind of “genre criticism.” This took place in some periods of Hellenism, in the era late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but especially strongly and brightly from the second half of the 18th century. In the era of the dominance of the novel, almost all other genres are “romanized” to a greater or lesser extent: drama is novelized (for example, the drama of Ibsen, Hauptmann, all naturalistic drama), the poem (for example, “Childe Harold” and especially “Don Juan” by Byron), even lyrics (a sharp example is Heine's lyrics). The same genres that stubbornly retain their old canonicity acquire the character of stylization. In general, any strict consistency of the genre, in addition to the artistic will of the author, begins to respond with stylization, or even parodic stylization. In the presence of the novel, as the dominant genre, the conventional languages ​​of strict canonical genres begin to sound in a new way, differently than they sounded in eras when the novel did not exist in great literature.

Parodic stylizations of direct genres and styles occupy a significant place in the novel. In the era of the creative upsurge of the novel - and especially during the periods of preparation for this upsurge - literature is flooded with parodies and travesties of all high genres (namely genres, and not individual writers and movements) - parodies that are harbingers, companions and a kind of sketches to novel. But it is characteristic that the novel does not allow any of its own varieties to stabilize. Throughout the entire history of the novel, there is a consistent parody or travesty of the dominant and fashionable varieties of this genre, tending to become stereotyped: parodies of the knightly novel (the first parody of the adventurous knightly novel refers to XIII century, this is "Dit d" aventures"), on a baroque novel, on a shepherd's novel ("The Extravagant Shepherdess" by Sorel), on sentimental novel(in Fielding, “Grandison the Second” by Museus), etc. This self-criticism of the novel is a remarkable feature of it as an emerging genre.

How is the novelization of other genres noted above expressed? They become freer and more flexible, their language is updated due to extra-literary heteroglossia and due to the “novel” layers of the literary language, they are dialogized, further, laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody penetrate widely into them, and finally - and this is the most important thing - the novel introduces into them problematic, specific semantic incompleteness and living contact with unfinished, becoming modernity (unfinished present). All these phenomena, as we will see later, are explained by the transposition of genres into a new special zone for the construction of artistic images (the zone of contact with the present in its incompleteness), a zone first mastered by the novel.

Of course, the phenomenon of novelization cannot be explained only by the direct and immediate influence of the novel itself. Even where such influence can be accurately established and shown, it is inextricably intertwined with the direct effect of those changes in reality itself that determine the novel, which determined the dominance of the novel in a given era. The novel is the only genre that is becoming, therefore it more deeply, significantly, sensitively and quickly reflects the formation of reality itself. Only the one who becomes can understand becoming. Roman became the leading character of the drama literary development of the new time precisely because it best expresses the trends in the formation of a new world, because it is the only genre born of this new world and in everything congenial to it. The novel in many ways anticipated and anticipates the future development of all literature. Therefore, coming to dominance, he contributes to the renewal of all other genres, he infects them with formation and incompleteness. He imperiously draws them into his orbit precisely because this orbit coincides with the main direction of development of all literature. This is the exceptional importance of the novel both as an object of study for theory and for the history of literature.

Literary historians, unfortunately, usually reduce this struggle of the novel with other ready-made genres and all the phenomena of novelization to the life and struggle of schools and movements. A novelized poem, for example, they call a “romantic poem” (this is true) and think that that says it all. Behind the superficial diversity and hype literary process They do not see the great and significant destinies of literature and language, the leading heroes of which are, first of all, genres, and movements and schools are heroes only of the second and third order.

Literary theory reveals its complete helplessness in relation to the novel. She works with other genres confidently and accurately - it is a ready-made and established object, definite and clear. In everything classical eras throughout their development, these genres retain their stability and canonicity; their variations across eras, trends and schools are peripheral and do not affect their hardened genre backbone. In essence, the theory of these ready-made genres, to this day, has been able to add almost nothing significant to what was already done by Aristotle. His poetics remains the unshakable foundation of the theory of genres (although sometimes it lies so deep that you cannot see it). Everything is going well until it comes to the novel. But even novelized genres put the theory at a dead end. On the problem of the novel, the theory of genres faces the need for a radical restructuring.

Thanks to the painstaking work of scientists, a huge historical material, a number of issues related to the origin of individual varieties of the novel are illuminated, but the problem of the genre as a whole has not found any satisfactory solution in principle. They continue to consider it as a genre among other genres, they try to fix its differences as a ready-made genre from other ready-made genres, they try to reveal its internal canon as a certain system of stable and solid genre characteristics. Works on the novel are reduced in the vast majority of cases to the most complete registration and description of novel varieties, but as a result of such descriptions it is never possible to give any comprehensive formula for the novel as a genre. Moreover, researchers are unable to indicate a single definite and firm feature of a novel without such a reservation that this feature, as a genre feature, would not be completely annulled.

Here are examples of such “reservation” signs: the novel is a multifaceted genre, although there are also wonderful single-layer novels; the novel is an action-packed and dynamic genre, although there are novels that reach the limit of pure descriptiveness for literature; the novel is a problematic genre, although the mass production of novels provides an example of pure entertainment and thoughtlessness that is not accessible to any other genre; novel - love story, although the greatest examples of the European novel are completely devoid of the love element; The novel is a prose genre, although there are wonderful poetic novels. Of course, many more similar “genre characteristics” of a novel, destroyed by a disclaimer honestly attached to them, can be cited.

Much more interesting and consistent are those normative definitions of the novel that are given by the novelists themselves, who put forward a certain type of novel and declare it the only correct, necessary and relevant form of the novel. Such, for example, is the famous preface of Rousseau to the “New Heloise”, the preface of Wieland to “Agaton”, Wetzel to “Tobias Knauth”; These are the numerous declarations and statements of romantics around “Wilhelm Meister” and “Lucinda” and others. Such statements, which do not try to embrace all varieties of the novel in an eclectic definition, but themselves participate in the living formation of the novel as a genre. They often deeply and truly reflect the struggle of the novel with other genres and with itself (in the person of other dominant and fashionable varieties of the novel) at a certain stage of its development. They come closer to understanding the special position of the novel in literature, incommensurable with other genres.

Of particular importance in this regard is a number of statements that accompanied the creation of a new type of novel in the 18th century. This series opens with Fielding's reflections on the novel and its hero in Tom Jones. Its continuation is Wieland's preface to Agathon, and the most significant link is Blankenburg's Essay on the Novel. The completion of this series is, in essence, the theory of the novel, given later by Hegel. For all these statements, reflecting the formation of the novel at one of its significant stages ("Tom Jones", "Agaton", "Wilhelm Meister"), the following requirements for the novel are characteristic: 1) the novel should not be "poetic" in the sense how poetic are other genres of fiction; 2) the hero of the novel should not be “heroic” either in the epic or in in a tragic sense this word: it must combine both positive and negative traits, both low and high, both funny and serious; 3) the hero should be shown not as ready-made and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, educated by life; 4) the novel should become for the modern world what the epic was for the ancient world (this idea was clearly expressed by Blankenburg and then repeated by Hegel).

All these statements-demands have a very significant and productive side - this is a criticism from the point of view of the novel of other genres and their relationship to reality: their stilted glorification, their conventions, their narrow and lifeless poetry, their monotony and abstractness, the readiness and immutability of their heroes. Here, in essence, a fundamental criticism is given of the literariness and poetry inherent in other genres and previous varieties of the novel (the baroque heroic novel and the sentimental novel of Richardson). These statements are supported to a large extent by the practice of these novelists. Here the novel - both its practice and the theory associated with it - appears directly and consciously as a critical and self-critical genre, which should renew the very foundations of the dominant literary and poetic nature. Comparing the novel with the epic (and contrasting them) is, on the one hand, a point in the criticism of other literary genres (in particular, the very type of epic glorification), on the other hand, it aims to raise the importance of the novel as the leading genre of new literature.

The statements-demands we have cited are one of the peaks of the novel’s self-awareness. This is, of course, not a theory of the novel. These statements also do not differ in great philosophical depth. But nevertheless, they testify to the nature of the novel as a genre no less, if not more, than existing theories of the novel.

In what follows, I make an attempt to approach the novel precisely as an emerging genre, heading the process of development of all literature of modern times. I am not constructing a definition of the canon of the novel operating in literature (in its history) as a system of stable genre characteristics. But I am trying to find the main structural features of this most plastic of genres, features that determine the direction of its own variability and the direction of its influence and impact on the rest of literature.

I find three such main features that fundamentally distinguish the novel from all other genres: 1) the stylistic three-dimensionality of the novel, associated with the multilingual consciousness realized in it; 2) a radical change in the time coordinates of the literary image in the novel; 3) a new zone for constructing a literary image in a novel, namely the zone of maximum contact with the present (modernity) in its incompleteness.

All these three features of the novel are organically interconnected, and all of them are determined by a certain turning point in the history of European humanity: its emergence from the conditions of a socially closed and deaf semi-patriarchal state into new conditions of international, interlingual connections and relations. The diversity of languages, cultures and times was revealed to European humanity and became a determining factor in its life and thinking.

I considered the first stylistic feature of the novel, associated with the active multilingualism of the new world, new culture and new literary and creative consciousness, in my other work. Let me briefly recall only the most important things.

Multilingualism has always existed (it is older than canonical and pure monolingualism), but it was not a creative factor, artistic and intentional choice was not the creative center of the literary and linguistic process. The classical Greek felt both “languages” and eras of language, diverse Greek literary dialects (tragedy is a multilingual genre), but creative consciousness realized itself in closed pure languages ​​(even if actually mixed). Multilingualism was ordered and canonized between genres.

A new cultural and literary-creative consciousness lives in an active multilingual world. The world has become like this once and for all and irrevocably. The period of silent and closed coexistence of national languages ​​has ended. Languages ​​are mutually illuminating; after all, one language can only see itself in the light of another language. The naive and consolidated coexistence of “languages” within a given national language has also ended, that is, the coexistence of territorial dialects, social and professional dialects and jargons, literary language, genre languages ​​within a literary language, eras in a language, etc.

All this came into motion and entered into a process of active interaction and mutual illumination. The word, the language began to be felt differently, and objectively they ceased to be what they were. In the conditions of this external and internal mutual illumination of languages, each given language, even under the condition of the absolute immutability of its linguistic composition (phonetics, vocabulary, morphology, etc.), is, as it were, born anew, becoming qualitatively different for the consciousness creating on it.

In this actively multilingual world, completely new relationships are established between language and its subject, that is, the real world, fraught with enormous consequences for all ready-made genres that developed in eras of closed and deaf monolingualism. Unlike other large genres, the novel took shape and grew precisely in conditions of heightened activation of external and internal multilingualism; this is its native element. Therefore, the novel could become the head of the process of development and renewal of literature in linguistic and stylistic terms.

I tried to highlight the deep stylistic originality of the novel, determined by its connection with the conditions of multilingualism, in the already mentioned work.

I turn to two other features that relate to thematic aspects of the structure of the novel genre. These features are best revealed and understood by comparing the novel with the epic.

In the context of our problem, the epic as a certain genre is characterized by three constitutive features: 1) the subject of the epic is the national epic past, the “absolute past” in the terminology of Goethe and Schiller; 2) the source of the epic is national tradition (and not personal experience and free fiction growing on its basis); 3) the epic world is separated from modernity, that is, from the time of the singer (the author and his listeners), by an absolute epic distance.

Let us dwell in more detail on each of these constitutive features of the epic.

The world of the epic is the national heroic past, the world of the “beginnings” and “peaks” of national history, the world of fathers and ancestors, the world of the “first” and “best”. The point is not that this past is the content of the epic. The relationship of the depicted world to the past, its involvement in the past is a constitutive formal feature of the epic as a genre. The epic has never been a poem about the present, about its time (becoming only a poem about the past for posterity). Epic, as a certain genre known to us, from the very beginning was a poem about the past, and the immanent epic and the author’s constitutive attitude for it (that is, the attitude of the speaker of the epic word) is the attitude of a person speaking about a past inaccessible to him, the reverent attitude of a descendant. The epic word in its style, tone, and character of imagery is infinitely far from the word of a contemporary about a contemporary addressed to his contemporaries (“Onegin, my good friend, was born on the banks of the Neva, where, perhaps, you were born or shone, my reader...” ). Both the singer and the listener, immanent in the epic as a genre, are in the same time and on the same value (hierarchical) level, but the depicted world of the heroes stands on a completely different and inaccessible value-time level, separated by an epic distance. National tradition mediates between them. To depict an event on the same value-time level with oneself and with one’s contemporaries (and, consequently, on the basis of personal experience and fiction) means making a radical revolution, moving from the epic world to the novel.

Of course, “my time” can be perceived as a heroic epic time, from the point of view of its historical significance, at a distance, as if from the distance of times (not from oneself, a contemporary, but in the light of the future), and the past can be perceived familiarly (as my present ). But in this way we perceive not the present in the present and not the past in the past; we remove ourselves from “my time,” from the zone of his familiar contact with me.

We are talking about epic as a specific real genre that has come down to us. We find it already a completely ready-made, even frozen and almost dead genre. Its perfection, consistency and absolute artistic non-naivety speak of its old age as a genre, of its long past. But we can only guess about this past, and it must be said frankly that we are still guessing about it very poorly. We do not know those hypothetical primary songs that preceded the composition of the epics and the creation of the genre epic tradition, which were songs about contemporaries and were a direct response to the events that had just happened. We can therefore only guess about what these primary songs of the Aeds or cantilenas were. And we have no reason to think that they were more similar to later (known to us) epic songs than, for example, to our topical feuilleton or topical ditties. Those epic heroic songs about contemporaries that are accessible to us and quite real arose after the composition of the epics, already on the basis of an ancient and powerful epic tradition. They transfer a ready-made epic form to modern events and contemporaries, that is, they transfer the value-time form of the past to them, introduce them to the world of fathers, beginnings and peaks, as if canonizing them during their lifetime. In a patriarchal system, representatives of the dominant groups, in a certain sense, belong as such to the world of “fathers” and are separated from the rest by an almost “epic” distance. The epic introduction to the world of the ancestors and founders of the contemporary hero is a specific phenomenon that grew on the soil of a long-prepared epic tradition and therefore explains the origin of the epic just as little as, for example, the neoclassical ode.

Whatever its origin, the real epic that has come down to us is an absolutely ready-made and very perfect genre form, the constitutive feature of which is the attribution of the world it depicts to the absolute past of national origins and peaks. The absolute past is a specific value (hierarchical) category. For the epic worldview, “beginning”, “first”, “initiator”, “ancestor”, “former before”, etc. are not purely temporary, but value-time categories, this is a value-time superlative degree, which is realized as in in relation to people, and in relation to all things and phenomena of the epic world: in this past everything is good, and everything essentially good (“first”) is only in this past. The epic absolute past is the only source and beginning of all good things for subsequent times. This is what the epic form says.

Memory, not cognition, is the main creative ability and power ancient literature. It was so, and it cannot be changed; the story of the past is sacred. There is still no consciousness of the relativity of any past.

Experience, knowledge and practice (the future) define the novel. In the Hellenistic era, contact arises with the heroes of the Trojan epic cycle; the epic turns into a novel. The epic material is transposed into the novel, into the contact zone, passing through the stage of familiarization and laughter. When the novel becomes the leading genre, the theory of knowledge becomes the leading philosophical discipline.

It is not for nothing that the epic past is called the “absolute past”; it, as at the same time a value-based (hierarchical) past, is devoid of any relativity, that is, devoid of those gradual purely temporal transitions that would connect it with the present. It is fenced off by an absolute boundary from all subsequent times, and above all from the time in which the singer and his listeners find themselves. This facet, therefore, is immanent in the very form of the epic and is felt and heard in every word of it.

To destroy this line means to destroy the form of the epic as a genre. But precisely because it is fenced off from all subsequent times, the epic past is absolute and complete. It is closed, like a circle, and everything in it is ready and complete. There is no place for any incompleteness, unresolvedness, or problematic nature in the epic world. It does not leave any loopholes into the future; it is self-sufficient, does not imply any continuation and does not need it. Temporal and value definitions are merged here into one inseparable whole (as they were merged in the ancient semantic layers of language). Everything that is attached to this past is thereby attached to true materiality and significance, but at the same time it acquires completeness and finality, and is deprived, so to speak, of all rights and opportunities for real continuation. Absolute completeness and isolation are a remarkable feature of the value-time epic past.

Let's move on to the legend. The epic past, fenced off by an impenetrable line from subsequent times, is preserved and revealed only in the form of national legend. The epic is based only on this legend. The point is not that this is the actual source of the epic; what is important is that the reliance on tradition is immanent in the very form of the epic, just as the absolute past is immanent in it. An epic word is a word according to legend. The epic world of the absolute past, by its very nature, is inaccessible to personal experience and does not allow for an individual personal point of view and assessment. It cannot be seen, felt, touched, it cannot be looked at from any point of view, it cannot be tested, analyzed, decomposed, or penetrated into its insides. It is given only as a legend, sacred and indisputable, invoking a generally valid assessment and requiring a reverent attitude towards itself. We repeat and emphasize: the point is not in the actual sources of the epic, and not in its substantive moments, and not in the declarations of its authors - the whole point is in its formal feature (more precisely, formal-substantive) constitutive for the genre of epic: reliance on impersonal indisputable tradition, universal significance of the assessment and point of view, excluding any possibility of a different approach, deep reverence for the subject of the image and the very word about it as a word of legend.

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Books

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The novel is one of the leading genres modern literature. Despite the fact that it appeared in the eighteenth century, the peak of its popularity falls directly on the new and modern times. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that in the modern world, novelistic issues, often dedicated to the fate of individuals, encounters fewer obstacles and restrictions than in previous eras.

If you answer the question of what a novel is, you can find two definitions. On the one hand, this is an epic work, exceeding several hundred pages in length. On the other hand, it is a work that tells about the destinies of individuals who are looking for their purpose in the world. Moreover, given that there are both novels in verse and lyric-epic novels, the second definition is closer to the truth. Works in this genre tend to depict modernity, either directly or indirectly. In the second case, the novel may take place in an alternative universe or in the past, but its problems will still refer us to the world of the present.

It is impossible to talk about what a novel is without mentioning its forms. Since there are many different works of this genre, their classification was adopted depending on some specific features. The most common forms of the novel include the following:

Adventure novel. In it, the plot revolves around the adventures of heroes who find themselves in various specific situations.

Well-known epics fall into this category. In such works, the author, as a rule, refers to a specific era and seeks to depict the fate of a particular class of people.

Psychological novel. In it, the reflections and experiences of the main character (who, as a rule, is alone) come to the fore. An effective plot line may be practically absent.

Satirical novel. As the name suggests, this form of novel satirizes various social phenomena.

Realistic novel. Works of this variety are aimed at an objective reflection of the surrounding reality.

Fantastic novel. This also includes works in the fantasy genre. In novels of this form, the author creates own world in which the action takes place. It could be any parallel reality or the distant mechanized future.

Journalistic novel. It is a work of journalism, created with the help and equipped with a plot.

So, the answers to the question of what a novel is can be extensive and varied, nevertheless, works of this genre are quite easy to distinguish from all other prose. As a rule, novels have a large length, and the characters in them develop throughout the plot. Many of them cover a wide range of problems that in one way or another relate to modern world. Therefore, when discussing what a novel is, one should remember that this genre is inseparable from the time in which its author lived and created. And then it becomes clear that the novel is an artistic reflection of reality.

Novel - literary genre, usually prosaic, which involves a detailed narrative about life and personal development Main character(heroes) in a crisis/non-standard period of his life.

The novel is a biography or a piece of biography. Novel - epic privacy

, models reality, but does not claim that the events are actually happening events.

The novel must be viewed historically. The oldest form that has come down to us is the adventure novel. They have a certain plot core. It consists mainly of overcoming external obstacles, is devoid of signs of time, there is no psychologism, there are no changes in the characters. This plot is in many ways close to fairy tale plot . But there is detailed descriptions

exotic countries.

The difference from the epic is that the hero is a private person. Such novels were entertaining. In antiquity, another type of novel arose - a parody novel (a parody of an adventure novel). Example: Apuleius "The Golden Ass". Traveling around Greece. Small scale hazards. He travels in the form of a donkey, the novel is very frank, through the eyes of a donkey the author can show low life, which the adventurous novel has never been interested in. The prospect for satire opens up.

"Don Quixote" is the most important stage in the development of the novel. Originally, it was a parody of a chivalric romance. Marked the transition from the chivalric romance to the novel itself. The novel widely describes the cruel prose of life. This is what Cervantes brings to the table. Cervantes is born new topic- a lonely eccentric in

cruel world

. This low reality becomes central to the picaresque novel. A picaresque novel, The heroes of picaresque novels became, crooks adventurers scoundrels. Usually the sympathies of the readers were on their side. Their victims were respectable ordinary people, officials

, criminal elements, as well as the same

rogues

, just like them. The picaresque novel develops into a social one. Such a novel appears in the 17th and 18th centuries. Gradually develops into psychological. MM. Bakhtin: “A novel is the inconsistency of the hero with his fate.” “Man is greater than his destiny or less than his humanity.”» The genre of the novel becomes universal. The most common form of the novel is the biographical novel.

Possible narrative options in the novel: from the birth of the hero until his death (“», Perfumer P. Zyskinda , “Doctor Zhivago” Pasternak), Oblomov;», from the birth of the hero until his/her life emerges from the crisis state of life (“);

Life of David Copperfield Charles Dickens», or " The burden of human passions

William Somerset Maugham

from the point of entry of the protagonist into a crisis state of life until the denouement (“

Crime and Punishment

Fedor Dostoevsky ). Fathers and Sons

Novel forms:

cultural-historical novel (Turgenev, Goncharov) a typical hero of his era. Such a novel is constructed as an ideological dialogue. The novel actually turns into a study. ideological (ideological novel) Dostoevsky.

The author does not accept the heroes' ideas, he lets the heroes speak out to the end and shows the consequences. "

Polyphonic novel

"(Bakhtin)