Novel Forms

Novel Forms

1. Romance

   • Presents life as we would like it to be
   • Strong gender roles
   • Themes of honour and loyalty (which may be tested)
   • Romantic love
   • Picturesque settings
   • Exciting, adventurous, beautiful, larger than life heroes and heroines
   • Emotionally satisfying and optimistic end
   • Drama and adventure

2. Autobiography

   • Incorporates feeling and introspection Includes facts of the subject’s experiences and activities
   • Writing that purposely and self-consciously provides an account of the author’s life
   • The history of a particular (wo)man’s life, written by the author about the author
   • Emphasis is on the author’s developing self

3. Realism

   • Represents an accurate imitation of human life as it appears to the common reader
   • Subjects are taken from everyday life - preferably, from lower class life
   • A major literary movement of the nineteenth century
   • Subjects live through ordinary experiences of childhood, adolescence, love, marriage, infidelity and death
   • It avoids poetic diction, idealisation, exaggeration, sentimentality or melodrama

4. Bildungsroman (Novel of growth)

   • By a series of false starts and mistakes and with help from well-disposed friends, they finally reach maturity and find their proper place in life.
   • An innocent, honest, inexperienced, well meaning but often foolish young person sets out in life with either no aim in mind.

5. Horror and Fantasy

   • Isolated settings – castles, churches, secret passages, towers, ruins, wild and deserted locations, mountains, rivers
   • Gloomy, obsessive, violent, spine-chilling tone
   • Darkness, night time, candlelight, moonlight and shadows
   • Storms, wind, rain, ice, snow, thunder and lightning
   • Suspense
   • Blood, dreams, death
   • Magical and supernatural elements
   • Violence

6. Satire / comedy of manners

   • The literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking towards it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn or indignation.
   • Satire is not comedy but it does use laughter as a weapon.
   • Satire is intended to correct human vice or folly.
   • Depicts the fashionable and sophisticated codes of behaviour of England’s upper classes where appearance and reputation were all and truth and morality less important.

7. Fairy tale

   • Usually a damsel in distress
   • ‘Prince charming’ or ‘knight in shining armour’ who is strong, noble and kind
   • May be castles, towers and palaces
   • Male character may be sent on a quest to prove that he is worthy of winning the female
   • Female character is rescued or ‘brought back to life’ by the male character
   • Happily ever after