Understanding the Modern Novel: Key Features and Subgenres
Key Characteristics of the Modern Novel
The modern novel is characterized by the following features:
- Realism and Plausibility: A taste for realism or at least plausibility.
- Structural Unity: The structural unit of the various episodes, obtained through a network of anticipations and memories and the evolution of the character that determines the selection of episodes and their order.
- Ambiguity and Relativism: Ambiguity and relativism in the form of presenting and analyzing reality.
- Credible Hero: A hero, far from the epic archetype, credible and representative of the depth of human beings.
- Live Dialogue: The use of live dialogue to characterize the characters and as a means of presenting a multiform reality.
- Flexibility: Flexibility in the style, structure, and narrative points of view to approach a multiple and changing world.
- Addressing Human Problems: The intent of responding to the problems confronting the human being, who is losing faith in reason and seeking answers to big questions about behaviors and attitudes or the fate of the human being himself.
Different sub-genres are formed from the imitation of a model. All these subgenera contain some common traits that the reader seeks and recognizes in them.
The Picaresque Novel and Lazarillo
The picaresque novel comes from Lazarillo, and the features it shares with this work are:
- Autobiography: The autobiography as a narrative method.
- Humble Origins: The humble origins of the protagonist and dishonorable character.
- Key Issues: Hunger and honor are key issues.
- Temporal-Spatial Realism: Temporal-spatial realism.
- Lower Classes as Protagonists: The lower classes become the protagonists of the story.
- Social Portrait: The protagonist of the story as a soul and an excuse to offer a social portrait of the era.
- Alternation of Fortune: The alternation of fortune and misfortune, the latter being dominant in just the final destination of the rogue.
Juan Ruiz and the Book of Good Love
The data known about the author of the Book of Good Love are scarce, and some can be interpreted in contradictory ways. It is known that he was Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, and was born in Alcalá, although there were many people with this name.
The Book of Good Love belongs to the first half of the fourteenth century. The first known edition dates from 1330, and the second most extensive from 1343.
Book of Good Love: Fans and Genre
The peculiarities of the Book of Good Love have hampered its study and understanding. The structure of the work—a false erotic autobiography interspersed in the most diverse materials—has prompted different explanations.
Book of Good Love: Intention and Subject
The declared intention of the work is didactic, although its meaning may be ambiguous for the modern reader. The author is well aware of this feature of his work and warns him from the beginning, comparing it to sounding a musical instrument according to the skill of the interpreter and noting that this interpretation has different plans.
Book of Good Love: Structure and Content
The work takes the form of an autobiography that, in addition to uniting loving, the diversity of materials presents an alleged experience of which.
Features of Tales
Tales is a brief narration of fictional events and simple character, made for moral or recreational purposes. The story is a form of literary narrative. Share with other narrative genres the presence of a narrator, who may use different points of view: first person, third person, rarely the second. Create a fictional reality that is also provided with spatial and temporal coordinates and does act to characters that star in a crime.
Features
The structure of the story usually has three parts: a beginning, middle, and end. The baseline approach is that the story presents something before the alter. This breakdown of stable baseline triggers a series of events called knot. The resolution of the dispute in question is the outcome, leading to a new stable condition.
The story has served in all cultures to convey moral lessons or practice, and their origins are ancient that it is impossible to determine. The first collections written in the Castilian tongue are late medieval and stories together Oriental and European literary elaborated by authors such as Don Juan Manuel.