Knowra Social novel Social novel A social novel explores how institutions, class relations, and material conditions shape people’s lives, often using individual characters to expose wider social problems.
Literary realism : A mode of fiction that represents ordinary life and social environments with plausible detail. Social novels often use realist settings and characters to make structural pressures concrete.
Hard Times : Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel criticizing utilitarian education and industrial society in the fictional Coketown. Its factory city and competing educational ideals concentrate the social novel’s critique.
Industrial Revolution : The transition to mechanized production and factory economies that began in Britain in the eighteenth century. Its social upheavals created conditions that many early social novels confronted.
Social problem film : A film genre that dramatizes social problems such as poverty, discrimination, or labor exploitation. It carries the social novel’s focus on institutions and lived consequences into cinema.
Social class : A social grouping shaped by economic position, resources, status, and relations to work. Class relations frequently determine the opportunities and constraints faced by social-novel characters.
Mary Barton : Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about working-class life and industrial conflict in Manchester. It centers workers’ hardship and the strained relations between laborers and employers.
Charles Dickens : An English novelist whose fiction portrayed poverty, institutions, and urban life in the nineteenth century. His novels made social criticism accessible through memorable characters and popular serial publication.
Naturalism (literature) : A literary movement that depicts people as strongly shaped by heredity, environment, and material conditions. Naturalist fiction intensified the social novel’s attention to forces constraining individual lives.
Characterization : The methods by which a narrative presents and develops fictional people. Individual lives give social structures their human consequences in the form.
North and South : Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel tracing conflict between a southern clergyman’s daughter and northern mill society. Its plot brings class conflict, industrial power, and personal relationships together.
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