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Novels, Society and History
'As readership grew and the market for books expanded, the earnings of authors increased'. Explain with examples.
As readership grew and the market for books expanded, the earnings of authors increased:
(i)This freed them from financial dependence on the patronage of aristocrats, and gave them independence to experiment with different literary styles.
(ii)Henry Fielding, a novelist of the early eighteenth century, claimed he was ‘the founder of a new province of writing’ where he could make his own laws. The novel allowed flexibility in the form of writing.
(iii)Walter Scott remembered and collected popular Scottish ballads which he used in his historical novels about the wars between Scottish clans. The epistolary novel, on the other hand, used the private and personal form of letters to tell its story.
(iv)Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, written in the eighteenth century, told much of its story through an exchange of letters between two lovers. These letters tell the reader of the hidden conflicts in the heroine’s mind
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What actions of Robinson Crusoe make us see him as a typical coloniser?
After 1740, the readership of novels began to include poorer people.
Novelists in colonial India wrote for a political cause.
Outline the changes in technology and society which led to an increase in the readers of the novel in the eighteenth century Europe.
Write a note on:
The Oriya novel
Write a note on:
Jane Austen's portrayal of women
Write a note on:
The picture of the new middle class which the novel Pariksha-Guru portrays.
Discuss some of the social changes in nineteenth-century Britain which Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens wrote about.
Summarise the concern in both nineteenth-century Europe and India about women reading novels. What does this suggest about how women were viewed?
In what ways was the novel in colonial India useful for both the colonisers as well as the nationalists?
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