English literature: The Novel
The Novel
The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. The novels of Charles Dickens, full to overflowing with drama, humor, and an endless variety of vivid characters and plot complications, nonetheless spare nothing in their portrayal of what urban life was like for all classes. William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for
Emily Brontë's (see Brontë, family) single novel,
Thomas Hardy's profoundly pessimistic novels are all set in the harsh, punishing midland county he called Wessex. Samuel Butler produced novels satirizing the Victorian ethos, and Robert Louis Stevenson, a master of his craft, wrote arresting adventure fiction and children's verse. The mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis Carroll, produced the complex and sophisticated children's classics
Sections in this article:
- Introduction
- The Postwar Era to the Present
- The Early Twentieth Century
- Poetry
- Nonfiction
- The Novel
- The Victorian Age
- The Romantic Period
- The Eighteenth Century
- The Jacobean Era, Cromwell, and the Restoration
- The Tudors and the Elizabethan Age
- Bibliography
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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