The Novels Focus On Inner Experience And Everyday Life

8 Pages 1971 Words

Question 7: How does the novel as a genre politicize the domain of everyday life and inner experience?

“The novel was the chief instrument by which older notions of social value (...) were displaced. (...) The novel played a powerful political role in its own way.”

Richard Kroll summarizes here one of Nancy Armstrong’s main arguments in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) and this quote could also be the summary of this essay. The novel as a genre gained political importance for two reasons: Firstly, the improvement of what Kroll calls “literature’s material conditions” caused a growth of literacy in England. The novel emerged out and used this improvement to bring issues on the domain of everyday life and inner experience into public discussion, and thus to political importance. Secondly, as the essay question implies, there are genre specific features, which “make” the domain of everyday life and inner experience “political in tone” and give them political relevance.

The change of the literature material conditions is significant, for the discussion how the domain of everyday life and inner experience won political importance through the novel. Ian Watt states in his The rise of the novel as an indirect result of the booksellers that literature was brought away from the control of the patronage to the control of the laws of the market place . An author had to satisfy no longer certain standards of a patron but was free to write critically, as long as his or her books were sold. One side result was the increase of female writers at that time, who like Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey and Mary Shelley in Frankenstein criticized the female role in society. Due to the relative cost of books and the creation of circulating libraries they reached more readers than before. Eve Tavor Bannet claims: “Lady novelists (...) well understood the power that fictions exercis...