novel, rise of the

novel, rise of the. The word ‘novellae’ was employed in the 16th cent. to describe the short tales of the Decameron and the Heptameron, and others. Used in a modern sense, the word ‘novel’ appears in England in the mid-17th cent., when it was chiefly associated with romances of illicit love. For this reason the word ‘history’ was more often favoured to describe the long prose fictions of the 18th cent. which were the precursors of the modern novel. The novel form developed through the memoir-novel and the epistolary novel of the 16th and 17th cents to the novel of the omniscient third-person narrator, which has dominated from the late 18th cent. to the present time. The chief novelists of the 18th cent. (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne) so greatly and rapidly developed the form that by the early 19th cent. J. Austen could write (albeit with a hint of irony) in Northanger Abbey, that in the novel ‘the greatest powers of the mind are displayed’. Form, style, and subject matter varied considerably, but by 1824 Sir W. Scott could confidently define the novel as ‘a fictitious narrative … accommodated to the ordinary train of human events’, a definition which may be allowed to stand today. (See also epistolary novel; fashionable novel; historical novel; memoir-novel; Oriental novel; sentiment, novel of.)