Main tendencies of the 18th century novel

Academic Paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: During the eighteenth century a number of innovations in both subject matter and narrative technique took shape. The novelists had to reconcile the demands of narrative order and the realistic portrayal. The art of fiction often involves the close imitation of true narratives. The novelists adopted various techniques in order to present the form and content of their works. Some of them, like Defoe, Defoe adopted the episodic technique, which more often than not produced a loose baggy form of a novel, without much sense of narrative order or progression or organic unity. Later Fielding self-consciously uses Chapters and Books as in his novel Joseph Andrews. This conflict between the demands of realistic presentation and aesthetic narrative order is evident in Sterne's anti-novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne blasts the conventions of the Novel even before this genre has had a chance to become a settled form.