English novel
The English novel is a tradition of extended prose fiction written in English, spanning varied forms, audiences, and historical periods.
The Pilgrim’s Progress: John Bunyan’s 1678 allegorical prose narrative follows Christian’s journey from the City of Destruction toward salvation. Its immense readership helped establish extended prose narrative as a popular English form.
Epistolary novel: A novel told through letters, diary entries, or other documents written by its characters. The form made private thought and unreliable testimony central to early English fiction.
Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen’s 1813 novel follows Elizabeth Bennet as she navigates courtship, family pressures, and social rank. Its irony and marriage plot made social judgment a source of both comedy and insight.
Romance (prose fiction): A prose-fiction mode organized around extraordinary adventures, idealized love, or improbable transformations. The novel’s claims to ordinary life developed partly in opposition to romance’s marvels.
Serial fiction: Fiction published in installments, often in periodicals or successive volumes. Serialization shaped Victorian novelists’ pacing and made fiction a recurring public event.
Robinson Crusoe: Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel depicts a castaway’s survival and self-fashioning on a remote island. Its documentary style and individual protagonist helped define the early English novel.
Bildungsroman: A novel tracing a protagonist’s psychological and moral development from youth toward maturity. Coming-of-age plots became a durable way to connect personal growth with social change.
Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel recounts an orphan’s pursuit of independence, love, and moral integrity. Its first-person voice joins Gothic suspense to a forceful account of a woman’s autonomy.
Gothic fiction: Fiction featuring terror, uncanny events, oppressive settings, and threats to established order. Gothic conventions repeatedly unsettle the realism associated with the English novel.
Victorian literature: Literature produced during Queen Victoria’s reign, from 1837 to 1901. The novel became a dominant Victorian form for examining class, industry, gender, and reform.