Answer the questions relating to the extract below. READ the extract carefully and the Patrick Parrinder Nation and the novel 2008 novel.
Question 1) Summarise Parrinder’s argument as to how the novel differs from the romance. What does he mean when he suggests that ‘all attempts to separate the novel from folk tales and romances depend on the novel’s identification with rationality and modernity? (400 WORDS)
Question 2) Give an example of how a distinction between the novel and the romance is central to one of the novels you have studied. (INCLUDE AN ARGUMENT) (600 WORDS)
EXTRACT:
Patrick Parrinder, Nation and the Novel (2008)
What is important in the present context is the way in which the distinction between the novel and the romance has shaped European literary and cultural history, for it was this belief that brought ‘the novel’ into being. Without it, whether or not there were individual novels, the novel as an institution could not exist. In England the distinction was first formulated in the late seventeenth century. William Congreve, the dramatist and occasional author of prose fiction, wrote in his preface to Incognita (1692) that romances are ‘generally composed of the constant loves and invincible courage of heroes, heroines, kings and queens, mortals of the first rank, and so forth’; they are characterized by ‘lofty language, miraculous contingencies, and impossible performances’. Novels, by contrast, are of a ‘more familiar nature’. One hundred and thirty years later Walter Scott distinguished between romance plots, with their ‘marvelous and uncommon incidents’, and the novel which is ‘accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society’. The distinction is not as clear-cut as these critics have wished to suggest, since virtually all novels contain romance elements such as coincidence, extremes of good and bad fortune, and a manifest moral significance in events. The keyword of Scott’s definition is, in fact, ‘modern’; all attempts to separate the novel from folk tales and romances depend on the novel’s identification with rationality and modernity. To anyone who is troubled by the restrictiveness of Congreve’s and Scott’s definitions, we should simply say: for ‘novel’ read ‘modern novel’. […]
Folk-tale and fairy-tale heroes are always the same, no matter how often their stories are told, but a novel must be novel just as today’s newspaper (also a seventeenth-century innovation) must differ from yesterday’s. Characters in novels ‘live and die once—in their novel’. The story that each novel tells is a new one, however neatly it fits an established pattern.
- Include an argument.
- INCLUDE QUOTATIONS TO YOUR POINT
- Provide a brief introduction and conclusion
- Include Harvard referencing and bibliography
Please use sources and include reference to this specific extract
- Please answer the questions separately
Novels to relate to in the questions: QUESTION 2 Argument
(choose 1 or 2 novels to include)
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
- The rise of fictionality Bye Catherine Gallagher
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- Great expectations By Charles Dickens
- Middlemarch By George Eliot
- Benedict Anderson cultural roots
