{"id":18685,"date":"2021-10-02T01:36:46","date_gmt":"2021-10-02T01:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.classicaldifference.com\/?p=18685"},"modified":"2022-01-29T00:17:33","modified_gmt":"2022-01-29T00:17:33","slug":"novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicaldifference.com\/novel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he novel, as a Western literary tradition, can be traced from the Greek epics of 2000 years ago, through the epics and romances of the medieval ages, down to today\u2019s classics. It was in the Christian West that narrative was refined into this \u201cnovel\u201d literary form\u2014the written art of storytelling.<\/p>\n

THE BEGINNINGS OF A LITERARY WORLD<\/h3>\n

For most of world history, illiteracy has been the norm. Cultures passed down their stories orally. Like an ancient movie screen (or TikTok depending on your age), Homer\u2019s The Iliad<\/em> and The Odyssey<\/em> would often be presented by a rhapsode (\u1fe5\u03b1\u03c8\u1ff3\u03b4\u03cc\u03c2), a classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry.<\/p>\n

All cultures have tales, and the pre-Christian peoples of Europe and Britain had their own elite story-tellers\u2014bard (Celtic, Welsh, and English), fili (Irish Gaelic), minstrel (European continent), scops (Germanic), and skald (Norse).<\/p>\n

Meter, rhyme, and other poetic formulas sustained timeless heroes and themes by making narratives easier to memorize and harder to change. Homer wrote his epics in dactylic hexameter, a form of rigorous rhyming structure (which does not work in English).<\/p>\n

Homer also used chiastic structure, found in many works like Herodotus\u2019 Histories<\/em> (c. 430 BC), Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost<\/em> (1667), and most notably, the Bible (as early as c. 1500 BC). At its simplest it is represented by the logical pattern A, B, B, A, but as with most poetic structures, it can be incredibly complex. Take one part away, and the structure breaks for all to see. Ancient stories were not as susceptible to the \u201ctelephone game\u201d as modern readers, indulged in prose, imagine.<\/p>\n

Some say the ancient Western epics helped make our own civilization possible, as their complexity, influence, and endurance brought a unique cultural unity to vast regions of independent city-states. Caesar Augustus later recognized this power, and commissioned the epic The Aeneid<\/em> to unite Rome. The power of story embedded in our culture would reach new heights with the invention of the novel.<\/p>\n

A BRIEF (hi)STORY LEADING TO THE NOVEL<\/h3>\n