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Pre-Eighteenth century
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Aesop's Fables
Aesopus
b. c.620
BCE (Greece), d 560 BCE
Aesop, according to legend, was a tongue-tied slave living on
the Greek island of Samos, who miraculously received the power
of speech, and subsequently won his freedom, only to be thrown
to his death by the citizens of Delphi for insulting their
oracle. But what we know as Aesop's Fables, is in reality a body
of work from a huge variety of sources. Among the earliest
recorded narratives, these stories have become embedded in the
Western psyche, like the stories of Oedipus and Narcissus. Who
isn't familiar, for example, with the story of "The Hare and the
Tortoise," where the lazy hare is outrun, despite his speed, by
the diligent tortoise? As well as stories about animals, Aesop's
Fables contains tales about everyday people, as in the story of
the boy who cried "wolf,"and it also gathers together jokes,
paradoxes, parables, and "just so" stories; whatever the actual
characters, the tone is always didactic."Zeus and the Camel"
tells how, when the camel saw another animal's horns, she begged
Zeus to give her horns as well, but Zeus was so angry at the
camel's greediness, that instead he cropped her ears. In the
story"Jupiter and the Frogs,"a famous parable about power, the
frogs ask Jupiter for a king. Not content with the king he sends
them at first, an easy-going log, they ask for a more powerful
ruler, only to be sent a water-snake, who kills them off one by
one.
The Fables remain very popular today, having been translated
into languages all around the world, and a great many subsequent
works of literature develop ideas first explored in them.
Without the example of Aesop, the world would never have had The
Romance of Reynard the Fox, and Kafka's The Metamorphosis would
be inconceivable. There would be no Just So Stories by Kipling,
and Orwell would never have written Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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Metamorphoses
Ovid
b.43 BCE (ltaly),d.1 7 CE
Ovid's Metamorphoses, which assembles some two hundred and fifty
stories from classical antiquity into one continuous narrative,
is a mythological history of the world, beginning with the
Creation and ending with the foundation of Rome and the
apotheosis of Julius Caesar.The constant questioning of
tradition and power is something encountered in many of Ovid's
narratives: Arachne challenges the goddess Athene to a
tapestry-making contest; Phaethon insists on taking the reins of
the sun chariot from his father; Daphne escapes from Apollo's
clutches by praying to a river god, who changes her into a tree.
When Ovid retells stories of heroism, it is in a comic,deflating
way, reminiscent of mock-epic. Whenever Perseus kills his
enemies by turning them to stone with the head of the Medusa
which he carries in a bag, it is not the heroic that we see, but
the use of a disproportionate force not unlike employing nuclear
weapons in a pub brawl.
The Metamorphoses' incorporation of dialogue within a
narrative,along with its wit, playfulness,and sheer sense of
fun, exemplifies much of what we now associate with the novel.
Today Ovid's work continues to be metamorphosed, and has had an
impact on a dazzling array of contemporary novelists, from
Salman Rushdie and A.S. Byatt, to Cees Nooteboom and Marina
Warner.
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Chaireas and
Kailirhoe
Chariton
b. cist century BCE (Greece), d.c. 1st century
Dates suggested for this classical "novel" vary from 50 BCE to
200 CE, though this story of the lives of two young lovers from
Syracuse is set during the time of the Persian Empire.The
author,Chariton, tells us that he is secretary to a rhetor of
Aphrodisias; the identity may be real or concocted. Chaireas and
Kailirhoe have fallen in love at first sight, and are eventually
allowed to marry, but jealous former suitors of the girl destroy
Chaireas'trust in his wife. He kicks her in the stomach and she
falls lifeless. Buried in the elaborate family tomb, Kailirhoe
awakens and cries for help.Tomb robbers, who have been attracted
by the valuables buried with the girl, take her away and sell
her to a respectable and conscientious landowner, Dionysos, who
lives on the coast of Ionia. He soon falls in love with the
slave girl, who looks like Aphrodite. On finding she is pregnant
by Chaireas, Kailirhoe agrees to marry Dionysos, giving her
unborn child an unsuspecting father. Chaireas, who has
discovered from the tomb-robbers that his wife is alive, goes in
search of her. The two meet again in Persia, at a complicated
trial over who has the right to be Kallirhoe's husband, but they
are not truly reunited until Chaireas has proven his heroism in
warfare, and the Great King of Persia has been partially
defeated. The child is left in the care of Dionysos while
Kailirhoe joins Chaireas and sails for home. Kallirhoe's fate at
the hand of her two lovers inspires readers to root for a woman
to commit adultery,and find her own voice.
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Aithiopika
Heliodorus
c.3rd century (Syria)
This influential early "novel" begins with a puzzling scene of
carnage not explained until mid-story.The divinely beautiful
heroine, Charikleia, and her lover, Theagenes, are captured by
bandits, and the chief bandit insists that the heroine must
marry him.The hero and heroine escape and once again fall in
with their guide, the Egyptian priest Kalasiris. Kalasiris'
mission is to restore the lovely Charikleia to her native royal
house in Ethiopia.The girl's mother, the Queen of Ethiopia, had
looked at a picture of white Andromeda at the moment of
conception, causing the girl to be born the wrong color. Her
mother was forced to give her up at birth, and Charikleia was
adopted by a man of Delphi, where Kalasiris found her; Theagenes
was already in love with her. They all journey to Ethiopia, as
the Egyptian priest is confident that he will be able to explain
the girl's identity; but when he suddenly dies, the young pair
are left at the mercy of a Persian satrap's court and the
jealousy of a noblewoman. The couple endure many ordeals before
the young princess, white except for a ring of black flesh about
her arm, arrives home and is ultimately accepted by her parents.
Riddles, wordplay, and ambiguous prophecies abound in this story
which may have influenced Mozart's The Magic Flute. Heliodorus'
elaborate and playful Greek is difficult, but early European
translations have had an impact on modern literature,
influencing writers as diverse as Shakespeare,Cervantes.and
Henry Fielding.
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The Golden Ass
Lucius
Apuleius
b.c. 123 (Africa Proconsularis), d.170
The Golden Ass is the only Latin novel to survive in its
entirety. Its style is racy, boisterous, and irreverent, as was
the mode of professional storytellers of the time, but
ultimately the story is a moral one,
Lucius,a young Roman aristocrat who is obsessed with magic, is
accidentally turned into an ass by his lover. In this guise, he
is led on a series of adventures which cause him to witness and
share the misery of the slaves and destitute freemen who, like
Lucius, are reduced to little more than animals by the treatment
of their wealthy owners.The book is the only work of literature
from the ancient Greco-Roman world that examines first hand the
conditions of the lower classes. Despite its serious subject
matter, the tone is bawdy and sexually explicit, as Lucius
spends time in licentious company. It is also significant for
its portrayal of contemporary religions; in the final chapters
of the book, Lucius is eventually turned back into a man by the
goddess Isis. Lucius is subsequently initiated into her mystery
cult, and dedicates his life to her. At this point the rowdy
humor of the earlier novel is exchanged for equally powerful and
beautiful prose. The Golden Ass is a precursor to the episodic
picaresque novel, and its entertaining mixture of magic, farce,
and mythology make for a read as compelling today as it must
have been originally.
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The Thousand
and One Nights
Anonymous
c. 850 Source
The tales that make up the collection known to us as The
Thousand and One Nights are some of the most powerful, resonant
works of fiction in the history of storytelling.The tales, told
over a thousand and one nights by Sheherazade to King Shahryar,
include foundational narratives such as "Sinbad','"Aladdin," and
"Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." These stories have an uncanny
capacity to endure. But while the tales of The Thousand and One
Nights ate remarkable for their familiarity and their currency,
perhaps their most important legacy is the concept of narrative
itself that emerges from them.
It is in the Nights that an underlying, generative connection is
fashioned between narrative, sex, and death—a connection which
has remained at the wellspring of prose fiction ever since. King
Shahryar is in the unseemly habit of deflowering and killing a
virgin on a nightly basis, and the Nights opens with Sheherazade
lining up to be the king's next victim. Determined not to meet
with such a fate, Sheherazade contrives to tell the king
stories; in accordance with her plan, they prove so compelling,
so erotic, so luscious and provocative, that at the end of the
night, he cannot bring himself to kill her. Each night ends with
a tale unfinished, and each night the King grants her a stay of
execution, so that he might hear the conclusion. But the
storytelling that Sheherazade invents, in order to stay alive,
is a kind of storytelling that is not able to end, that never
reaches a climax. Rather, the stories are inhabited by a kind of
insatiable desire, an open unfinishedness that keeps us reading
and panting, eager for more, just as King Shahryar listens and
pants.The eroticism of the tales, their exotic, charged texture,
derives from this desirousness, this endless trembling on the
point both of climax,and of death.
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Gargantua and
Pantagruel
Francois
Rabelais
1494 -1553
The history of the modern novel begins with Rabelais. Allowing
for some of the minor precedents which he subjected to pastiche,
Rabelais'Pantagruei, published under his acronymic pseudonym
Alcofribas Nasier, established a whole new genre of writing with
a riotous mix of rhetorical energy, linguistic humor, and
learned wit. In creating a comedy of sensory excesses, playing
off various licentious, boozy, and lusty appetites, Rabelais
also prefigures much in the history of the novel from Don
Quixote to Ulysses. Perhaps his greatest achievement is his
free-spirited ness, which combines high-jinking vulgar
materialism with a profound, skeptical mode of humanist wit.
The novel itself tells the story of the gigantic Gargantua and
his son Pantagruel. The first book details fantastic incidents
in the early years of Pantagruel and his roguish companion
Panurge.The second book, Gargantua, tracks back in time to the
genealogy of Pantagruel's father, while making scholasticism and
old-fashioned educational methods the object of satire. The
third book develops as a satire of intellectual learning mainly
through the heroic deeds and sayings of Pantagruel. In the
fourth book, Pantagruel and Panurge head off on a voyage to the
Oracle of the Holy Bottle in Cathay, which provides scenes for
satire on religious excess. The fifth and most bitter book,
takes them to the temple of the Holy Bottle where they follow
the oracle's advice to "Drink!" The inconsequential plot hardly
rises to the level of picaresque, but there is a feast of mirth
in the telling.Thomas Urquhart's seventeenth-century translation
of the first three books is a marvel in its own right, and
preferable in many ways to twentieth-century attempts to
translate the spirit of Rabelaisian rhetoric.
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Euphues: The
Anatomy of Wit
John Lyly
1553-1606
Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit was published during the
reign of Elizabeth I, for the consumption of a legendarily
cultured and leisured audience of courtiers and nobility. While
it is not exactly a novel, it has the general outline, as well
as some of the features of what would later become the novel
form. Though hardly read today, the text was significant enough
to conjure an addition to the English lexicon in the word
"euphuism," which means an affected elegance or overwroughtness
in language.
Euphues is relentless in its display of verbal affectation,
comprising a sort of ludicrous handbook of grand expressions and
apothegms. The plot is negligible in its moralizing twists and
countertwists, more or less just a frame over which the
multitude of polite phrases is draped. What makes Euphues
fascinating for the non-specialist reader is its great dexterity
in handling and varying the conventional exempla of courtly
speech. This dexterity smothers the impulse for any type of
genuine literary originality—a quality which would later be
prized as the single most important criterion of great
literature. This is the sort of verbal ostentation and intricacy
that would come to be most detested both by the pious authors of
the Protestant Reformation and by Romantics such as Samuel
Coleridge, for whom skill in the manipulation of conceits stood
as evidence of either a corrupted intelligence or a heart
cynically detached from its pen. Lyly himself was quite aware of
these objections, and unruffled enough by them to acknowledge
them in advance: "honnie taken excessiuelye cloyeth the stomacke
though it be honnie," he once wrote. What he was canny enough to
perceive is that the ruling class enjoys nothing so much as
excessive consumption.
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The Unfortunate
Traveller
Thomas Nashe
1567-1601
The Unfortunate Traveller is perhaps the most brilliant
Elizabethan novella. Nashe tells the complex and disturbing
story of Jack Wilton, an amoral young recruit in Henry Vlll's
army in France. Wilton has a series of dangerous adventures,
starting when he worms his way into the good offices of the
army's Lord of Misrule, a cider seller. He convinces the man
that the king regards him as an enemy spy, and receives a great
deal of free drink. Eventually the king is confronted and the
plot is exposed, resulting in a whipping for Wilton {although we
are aware that in the real world a harsher punishment would have
befallen him). Wilton then travels throughout Europe, witnessing
the destruction of the Anabaptist Utopia established in Munster
(a more dangerous form of misrule), before reaching Italy where
he witnesses even more spectacular vice and cruelty,
specifically the executions of two criminals, Zadoch and
Cutwolfe. He encounters a banished English earl who tries to
persuade him that travel is a cursed activity best avoided,
concluding that we can learn nothing from travel that we could
not have acquired in a "warm study." Eventually Wilton returns
to England, horrified at what he has witnessed, and vows to
remain at home in the future.
The Unfortunate Traveller is disturbing and funny by turns, with
every description undercut by a powerful irony, so that we are
not sure at the end whether we are being told that travel is an
enlightening or a pointless process. Nashe's descriptions,
especially those of violence, are a brilliant and unsettling
combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary, notably when
the dying Zadoch has his fingernails "half raised up, and then
underpropped . . . with sharp pricks, like a tailor's shop
window half-open on a holiday."
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Don
Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
1547-1616
Don Quixote stands at the head of a long line of fictions of
which fictionally itself is the principal substance. Don Quixote
has read himself into madness by reading too many books of
chivalry,and so sets out to emulate the knights of old, first by
getting himself some armour (out of pasteboard) and a steed (a
broken down nag), and then by getting himself knighted. He goes
to an inn, which he thinks a castle, meets prostitutes whom he
thinks high-born ladies,addresses them and the innkeeper, who is
a thief, in language so literary that they cannot understand it,
and then seeks to get himself knighted by standing vigil all
night over his armour. Apart from the burlesque parody of
romances of chivalry, the ludicrous transformation of the sacred
rituals and spaces of knighthood into their ad hoc material
equivalents parallels a similar desacralizing going on Europe at
the time.
In all this it is the knowing reader rather than the characters
or the action that is the implied subject of address. Indeed,
Cervantes here invents the novel form itself, by inventing the
reader.
Reading begins with the Prologue's address to (he "idle" reader,
and by implication extends throughout the first book, as
Quixote's friends attempt to cure his madness by burning his
books to slop him reading. In the process we meet readers, and
occasions for reading, of all kinds. In 1615, Cervantes
published a second book in which Don Quixote becomes not the
character reading but the character read as many of the people
he meets h.we read Book I and know all about him and his
non-reading sidekick Sancho Panza. Indeed this combination of
the always already read and the force of perpetual reinvention
is what continues to <lf(iw the reader in.
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The Pilgrim's
Progress
John Bunyan
1547-1688
One of the most popular works ever written in the English
language, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress continues to be
published in new editions, remain on bestseller lists, and
retain an enduring relevance today. Much of this appeal lies in
its combination of unadorned piety with narrative simplicity, a
combination that meant for centuries it was read in conjunction
with the Bible as the primary work of Christian devotion and
reflection. Bunyan was, however, a more controversial figure
than the conservative reputation of The Pilgrim's Progress
suggests. His own spiritual struggles are documented in his
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and he probably
wrote part of The Pilgrim's Progress in prison for religious
dissent. If one avoids the anodyne modern spelling versions, one
can still find in the protagonist Christian's journey a powerful
sense of seventeenth-century religious conviction (the first
part of modern editions was published in 1678, the second part
followed in 1684).
The first part follows Christian as he journeys to the Celestial
City.on the way encountering memorable characters such as
Talkative, Faithful, Evangelist, and Hopeful, and passing
through temptation and torment in the City of Destruction,
Castle Doubt, and Vanity Fair. The second part traces the same
journey undertaken by Christian's wife Christiana and his
children, and takes on quite a different character. Regardless
of a reader's personal religious convictions, these allegorical
journeys become emblematic of the spiritual and moral struggle
of the individual in the world.The Vanity Fair episode, in which
the protagonists are assailed by temptation, apathy, self-love,
and consumerist excess, seems as relevant to twenty-first
century life as it was to seventeenth-century England.
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The Princess of
Cleves
Marie-Madelaine
Pioche de Lavergne,Comtesse de La Fayette
1634-1693
This profound story of forbidden love enflamed and then resisted
until it dies an unnatural death takes place in the court of
Henry II of France during the last years of his reign (c.
1558).The young heroine of the title enters a society in which
the adulterous love affairs of the powerful and beautiful make
up the only important action. Determined to protect the Princess
from this world at the same time as introducing her to it, her
mother agrees to an early marriage with the Prince of Cleves
whom the Princess respects but cannot love passionately. She
then falls utterly in love with the Due de Nemours, the most
sought after man at court, and he with her. Their love is never
consummated, nor is it determined by accident or fate; it is
both encouraged and resisted in the course of a series of
scandalous scenes of intimacy and betrayal that were themselves
received as a literary scandal by La Fayette's own society not
merely because they were regarded as implausible, but because of
their evident singularity of purpose.
In one scene, Nemours, aware that the Princess is watching,
steals a portrait of her belonging to her husband. Nemours
watches the Princess' reaction, noting that she does nothing to
intervene. In a second, the Princess confesses to her husband
that she is in love with another man while Nemours, that man,
looks on unobserved and listens to her confession. In a third,
Nemours, spied on by a servant of her husband, follows the
Princess to her country house where he sees her contemplating a
picture in which he is represented. All of these scenes provoke
overwhelming and unresolvable turmoil in the Princess but offer
the modern reader an experience of compelling narrative and
emotional complexity.
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