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The Columbia History of the American NovelAre the sacred scriptures of ancient people, such as the Bible and the Koran, histories exactly? Did human imagination play a role in their creations? If so, are they to some degree or in part fictional narratives? By the time Cervantes composed Don Quixote, often considered to be the first true novel, people had been writing fictional or semifictional stories with plots, characters, settings, suspense, humor, irony, narrative twists, and surprise endings for centuries. The point at which we can say "there is the first novel in English" is no longer a simple matter. Defining the novel as a genre even in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries is difficult because, from the first, experimentation and innovation prevailed: the epistolary form of Richardson, the journal narrative of Defoe, the fantastical tales of Swift, the picaresques of Fielding, the tales of seduction of Susanna Rowson, the domestic intrigues of Austen, the gothics of Mary Shelley and the Brontes. Then, what are we to make of texts of the ...» |
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